It’s Monday morning. Over the last week I’ve been in touch with six of my friends and family and looking back, I realised I’d used several different ways to contact them:

* I wrote a postcard to my aunt to thank her for my birthday present;
* I emailed my mother to see when she can next come to visit;
* I wrote on the Facebook wall of an old friend who I haven’t seen for years;

What interests me is how I made the decision about how best to communicate with each of those people. It all seems clear if I give it a bit of thought. For example, my aunt isn’t on email and always appreciates a hand-written note. It was better to text my partner rather than ring because I knew she’d be putting the children to bed. I knew that what I wrote on a Facebook wall would be visible to everyone, but that the direct message would not.

I’d love to find out more about the underlying psychology of this because it fascinates me to realise that people seem to be able to work out for themselves which communication mechanisms (or channels as the text books call them) work best for which situations. This seems to happen without any widespread debate or discussion, and the consensus that forms is frequently different to the one that the inventors of the technology originally envisaged. More to the point, the consensus seems to change over time as people discover better tools for saying what we want to say. Looking at my list above, I was very interested to note that at least a third of the channels I used have only been available in the last 3 years.

But I don’t believe that as marketers we pay enough attention to this continually changing messaging environment. We get stuck in doing what we’ve always done without testing to see if there are better ways to get our messages across.

I think my musings in an earlier post still hold true about how companies should be cautious when experimenting with these new communication techniques. I also think that we can be equally short-sighted if we start to believe too much media hype about whether email as a medium is dead. But it does strike me that if we don’t at least try to bring our own personal experience of changing channels into the way we plan to communicate with our customers - and take advantage of the tools that systems such as Lyris HQ provide for us to do so - then we risk being seen as out of touch. And in my opinion, being in touch seems to pretty well sum up what we’re trying to achieve.

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About The Author

Kieran Cooper is senior manager of support services for Lyris' international operations. Located in the Lyris UK office, he is responsible for account management, implementation and support.

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