Promenade Media

© Bill Browning

Having numerous digital voices (or e-personas) is important when you want to be an efficient and consistent communicator.

Have you ever found yourself in the awkward position when encountering someone at a party, stop-and-chat, or some other sort of event and the other person tells you point blankly, “you never responded to my email.” We’ve all been here and hard the truth is that our excuses (if we even have one) are lame. Socially acceptable ones may include, “I was in the wilderness,” “My kid was sick,” or “My iPhone died.”

I like to think that a reasonable turnaround time for answering an email is 48 hours, unless it’s a Friday afternoon or a matter of extreme urgency. There’s also the case of being busy. Not everyone sits at a desk all day, and if they’re in meetings their phone is usually turned off or set to vibrate. And the turnaround time for a colleague sitting three cubes from you should be pretty quick since, well, they can see you.

We also have different expectations for different types of people in our lives when it comes to communicating digitally. Responding to a friend’s public post on Facebook or Twitter tweet should be crafted carefully because, unless your privacy settings are meticulously selected (most aren’t), hundreds of people can see your response. This has forced most of us to adopt different personalities (or “e-personas,” as I like to call them) – catering to each type of person we need to communicate with.

First you’ve got your real-life self. Hopefully this real-life self closely matches the e-persona you use when communicating with close friends and family (unless you’re a sociopath or asshole of some kind). This e-persona is also adaptable to elements of sarcasm and, sometimes, e-bullying. And since the people you communicate with in this e-persona should know you well, they will have no problem telling you to shut the hell up if you’ve gone too far.

Then there’s the e-persona you might use with colleagues or fair weather friends. Dialogue in emails with these folks should be carefully crafted, especially if you desire that one of those fair weather friends might some day become a close friend. This e-persona might also be used with someone you just started to date.

Lastly, there’s the agreeable, robotic, e-persona. The one you wouldn’t fill in the “To” field in your email until the body was completely spell-checked and revised for proper tone. This is the one we would use when answering an email from your boss, the CFO, or when applying for a job. I should be clear that e-personas shouldn’t be falsifications of our true selves… just different versions.

With all of this there is, again, the importance of turnaround time and the expectations that lie within. If I don’t respond to an email thread or even a direct email from a close friend, they can safely assume that I’ll address it in a text, future phone conversation, or Facebook post. But sometimes I’ll ignore an email from friend completely simply because I thought it was stupid – and I’d tell them so (“respectfully, Mike, your email was pointless and dumb” – in which Mike might respond, “I know, but that link you sent me last week was really a waste of my time.”). My mom will sometimes ignore emails I send to her, but I don’t care – she’ll just follow up with a phone call… her preferred method of communication.

The above examples are the exceptions to the rule. Ignoring emails should not be taken lightly. The 48 hour turnaround time should hold true for everyone else (colleagues, co-workers, bosses, managers, customers, fair weather friends), or else you might come across as careless, inefficient, or untrustworthy.

The same can be said for doing business. Gone are the days of annoying the hell out of customers with overly loud radio commercials and TV ads. And gone are the days of really reeling in some new business with a full size newspaper ad. Even though we might have success with social media and other web marketing efforts, email is still an acceptable tool for engaging with customers, finding out their needs, and promoting the goodness of your products and services. Speaking as customer, if I email a business (or even reach out to one on Twitter or Facebook) to find out about a product or service and they don’t get back to me for a month – well, then, they pretty much suck.

I was born with a hearing impairment that created social, learning, and vocabularic deficiencies. I connected with the language of music and film almost immediately, as they made up for any losses attributed to the fact that I was the “shy kid who can’t hear very well.” I entered college in 1993, just as email had gone mainstream – this was a boon for my growth as a communicator. Yet still there was the struggle of finding a voice. Eventually as a married adult I became a confident person who knows where he fits in and what he wants. Did digital communication help with that? Tremendously.

You can still ignore emails from your friends – just make sure there’s that understanding of “I’ll touch base with you later” in place. It can even make you a more efficient person, leaving more time to respond to emails that hold up to someone’s expectations of you as a colleague, co-worker, employee, or person who he/she might want to marry some day. If you’re a business owner, then email is still a viable tool to use when responding to customers in a very timely manner.

Josh Valentine is Chief Marketing Strategist at Promenade Media and current President of the Maine Marketing Association. He usually responds to emails in a timely manner unless, of course, it’s crap.

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Cousins?

KISS is brand, not a band. Sure, they’ve written some respectable anthems and metal riffs and invented the destructive rock stage production, but when you strip them down to the core – ordinary consumers really only remember the images: the logo, the products, the face paint. And like any great small business or brand, KISS had their floundering years – the “non-makeup era” from 1983-1996. You could say they sold out during those years, attempting to portray the notion that they were serious musicians – even though that’s when they made some of their best music.

KISS co-founder and Family Jewels star, Gene Simmons, was recently interviewed by a British journalist during his band’s warm-up for their 2010 European tour. Simmons has never been shy about his prime motivator (money) or strayed from embellishing his accomplishments (he “discovered” Van Halen) – it’s what a good marketer does. Currently, he’s involved in so many different business deals and partnerships, including capitalizing on KISS’ golden years, that his interviews can be used as lessons in business and marketing. While his recollections and answers are mostly repetitive (repetition = consistency), Simmons still portrays himself as the most transparent business person in Hollywood. He even once said, “I don’t even know what marketing is. Sales and marketing? What’s the difference?”

The focus of talks with Simmons these days is understandably about his reality show. But more often than not, they touch on technology, the web, communications, messaging, new methods of marketing, and how he handles them.  Here’s what we can take away from the recent interview:

1) Organization (or, set a blogging schedule)

Interviewer: So just how do you keep on top of everything with all your various projects on the boil?
Gene: I do what Santa Claus does – I make a list, I check it twice. It’s all very organized. I need to spend time with my family and keep track of my projects and it’s all written down in order. I need to remind myself that Kiss is a brand, not a band.

Blog regularly to create fresh content and increase traffic for your website (you can even hire someone to maintain your blog and provide well-written and keyword-optimized web copy). I’m not saying you should keep a paper book like Gene, but don’t slack on your web efforts. Gene’s website is a mess and he doesn’t blog (he does tweet), but he probably never misses a meeting.

2) Is your Message Important? (or, is your message worthy of the hype?)

Interviewer: Do you have a full-time secretary?
Gene: I use a traditional diary with room for notes. The [portable web] means well, but it fails in that it treats [all] information exactly the same, when it’s not. “Blow up the world” is a big thing, [but] “clip your toenails” should be in small letters because they’re not the same value.

He makes a beautiful point here in that web users regularly struggle with (albeit subconsciously) balancing the steady stream of marketing messages they’re inundated with. A big mistake in many web marketing and social media campaigns is when matters of no importance, or of little interest, are meant to hold the same weight as the big exciting stuff. Being engaging is fine, but don’t waste your customers’ time.

3) Are your Emails Bogged Down by Words? (or, do you want the recipient to die in a fiery car crash while emailing and driving?)

Interviewer: Is modern technology important to you?
Gene: When you get an email with an attachment nobody reads it – they just skim. In my business where I deal with CEOs of companies – if Donald Trump sends me an email I want to understand what it says. For important stuff you need to consider it and digest it and that means a computer screen. So I sit down three times a day at a computer to digest and understand my emails. Other than that I use my traditional diary with a pen and lists.

It’s understandable that Gene wants to focus 100% on emails with Trump, his partner in megalomania and questionable hair. He’s The Donald, for crying out loud. We now know Gene likes pens, lists, papers. Mobile computing is a no-go for him for the important things. So, as a small business beefing up its web marketing you should figure out how to leverage the technological tools currently available. Should a social media campaign focus on blog posts and engagement? Or maybe a barrage of daily tweets or Facebook posts? The number one task should be to define your target audience. Part of this process is discovering which tools they’re using. Consult with a professional, if you need to. Trump and Gene are perfect for marketing to each other – both with their delusions of grandeur (that have obviously worked out well for them).

4) Be Direct. Be Transparent. (or, consumers are on to you – so stop playing games)

Interviewer: And do you still use an old fashioned telephone plugged into the wall?
Gene: I do have a mobile phone. Very few people use it but it’s called “the money phone.” You can reach me and if you have money you call. If you don’t, and you call up and say “hi Gene” you’ll get the reply “wrong number.” I don’t chat.

Wow. Just wow. Gene just summed up the company/customer relationship that’s existed for thousands of years in three sentences. In this case, we’ll say the people who “have money” are the companies – or the producers of products – and Gene is the customer. Consumers, audiences, your target market – they now fast-forward through commercials, stopped buying magazines, and barely listen to terrestrial radio. Can you help them? Can you provide a service they need? Can you solve a problem for them? Your market is not going to sit idle to “chat,” but they don’t mind being engaged with valuable content (in Gene’s case, money is the most valuable).

I swear, a series of web marketing and social media seminars can be developed on 40 years of Gene’s musings. Many of these ideas are mostly common sense, but Gene Simmons simplifies them, breaks them down, and rids them of the bull. As Van Halen’s David Lee Roth once said, “it’s not rocket surgery.” After all, Gene discovered him.

Josh Valentine is Chief Marketing Strategist at Promenade Media. He is also the upcoming President of the Maine Marketing Association and a lifelong KISS fan. His favorite KISS album is Revenge.

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