The Science of Communicating & Marketing Your Business

Part 3 expanded on the concept of psycho-social distance as the "Six Degrees of Separation". Here we get personal...

Joseph Carrabis, Chairman, CRO and Founder
NextStage Evolution/NextStage Global
NextStage: Predictive Intelligence, Persuasion Engineering, Interactive Analytics and Behavioral Metrics
http://www.nextstagevolution.com
http://www.nextstageglobal.com
US Offices: 49 Brinton Dr/Nashua, NH 03064-1274/603 577 4575 voice/603 791 4627 fax
Canadian Offices: 7045 Edwards Blvd, Suite 401/Mississauga, Ontario, L5S 1X2/905 564 6929 x300 voice/905 564 9468 fax

• Defining Attention on Websites & Blogs IMedia column
• Have you played the game?
• Intersection of Media and Science Blog
• I'll be speaking at the San Francisco April '07 Emetrics Summit on Quantifying and Optimizing the Human Side of Online Marketing on May 7, 2007. Come on by and say hello.

1. First thing to notice is that I use a smaller font for my signature file than the rest of the message.
2. The first item is a quote. All my signature files on all my email accounts contain a quote of some kind.
3. Next comes a space, a visual separation between the quote and what comes next. We'll learn that this is important later in this post.
4. Next is my name and titles all in italics.
5. The next line are the names of the companies I helped found, again all in italics.
6. Next and in bold is the companies' tag line, moniker, elevator pitch, call it what you will.
7. The names of the companies I helped found. First the group I run, NextStage Evolution, followed by our sister company, NextStage Global. These are both in italics.
8. Likewise, the next two lines are addresses and phone numbers. Again, NextStage Evolution precedes NextStage Global. These are also in italics.
9. What comes next is a block. This block contains links to my latest writings, where I'll be talking, presenting, things I want readers to take notice of. Note that it is visually separated from what comes before and after.
10. The last item is the disclaimer, the "you have to be this tall to get on this ride" piece.

One of my mentors would often have us pile in his car and drive around. He would point to signs on the road and ask us what they meant, what were they communicating beyond the obvious.

Here's an example; drive out of the center of Tyngsboro, MA, towards Rt 3 and you'll encounter a sign indicating where to turn to get on Rt 3 South. There is a place named on the sign. Tyngsboro is about thirty miles from Boston, between 25-40 minutes drive depending on traffic.

But the place named on the sign is "Burlington", a town about halfway between Tyngsboro and Boston. The sign is very old, probably from the 1950's or early 1960s.

What is communicated beyond the obvious? Perhaps that when the sign was placed there getting to Burlington was more important than getting to Boston for most Tyngsborians? Was it possible that when the sign was placed people thought of Burlington as a necessary destination on the way to Boston, kind of a way-station demarcating a necessary stop on the greater journey?

More importantly, what did your understanding of the sign reveal about you, to yourself and others?

As my mentor often told me, "Everything is a sign. You just have to figure out what the meaning is." Or "meanings are" in most cases. I wrote about the silences between musical notes and the spaces between words and images in Shared Traits of Great Web Design. The same is true here, with the concept of silences and whitespace coming through as "what's not in the signature file is as important as what's in it". A small signature file, one that is sparse, tells just as much if not more as one as verbose as the example above.

More to follow...

Please contact NextStage for information regarding presentations and trainings on this and other topics.

Links for this post:

• Online Anthropology blog posts
• Online Identity blog posts
• Online Privacy blog posts
• Online Trust blog posts
• The Using Your "SEND" Glands? arc