The Science of Communicating & Marketing Your Business

I usually don't write these arcs right when I'm still excited about our research findings because (and Kim and others have noticed this) I'm like a kid telling his parents about all the fun he had at the carnival; all excitement and exuberance and the parents have to slow the child down to understand what he's talking about.

That offered, my thanks to Kim for slowing me down. I'm going to use this post to provide some overview and explanation of this arc for readers with an interest. Do I still think these are exciting findings? Oh, yes, very much so.

So catching my breath...

Often we're asked to analyze email exchanges with the goal of answering, "Is the sender of this email sincere?" This is a question asked more and more often by companies or individuals wanting to engage in some kind of partnership with another company or individual.

Think of it this way; you meet someone and just don't feel comfortable with the person. You can't point at something they've done to make you uncomfortable, it's just how you feel. Because you can't pinpoint anything you go ahead with whatever agreement you were planning only to discover later that you should have followed your instincts. People who do follow their instincts sometimes say they "had a sense" about the other person.

One of the things NextStage's Evolution Technology^TM lets NextStage do is very clearly pinpoint what is causing those instincts to trigger and you to get that "sense" about someone else, only in these cases, NextStage is doing it to online and offline communications.

Companies use this to refine their marketing efforts (making sure prospects and target audiences feel comfortable with marketing material) and to get a help them in negotiations. You can find an example of this on our Comments page;
"NextStage Evolution has repeatedly saved us time and money during contract negotiations and the interviewing process. It's ability to find hidden meanings in what people write has always helped us win the upper hand." - John Scullin, Director, Board of Health, Stoneham, MA

More and more companies are using our Resume Reader tool for this exact same purpose. This resume reader tool helps job seekers remove unintentional, offputting messages from their resumes and helps potential employers rapidly find the top candidates for a given position.

So NextStage has these tools we've been using to help companies and individuals communicate better and one of the places we've been applying these tools is to emails. One of the things these tools very clearly indicated was that the email signature files often influence readers far more strongly than the content of the emails themselves even when the reader stated they paid no attention to the signature file.

This caused us to turn our attention very strongly to what people were putting in their signature files and to match that information against psychographs of these same people. We've been making suggestions to certain individuals who were willing to take part in testing what we learned and the results were striking.

I'll share one example that stands out strongly in my mind; a woman had been seeking a job for over a year with no luck. She was well qualified for every job she applied for yet never got a nibble. We suggested three changes to her signature file and she had three job offers within a week. One company contacted her the day she sent her resume to them and had her in for first and second level interviews that same week. Two other companies started calling every few days to get her in for interviews.

As I wrote above, her results were dramatic and we're telling people that their mileage may vary. Never-the-less, these results are occuring with others.

So sometime last week NextStage decided yes, okay, it was time to go public with this research. We'd seen in the journals that other people had done similar research and we incorporated their findings with ours, seeing where things fit and where they didn't, refining our results where other researchers had done tests we hadn't, so on and so forth.

The end result of all this is that people's use their email signature files the way animals use scent glands; to mark territory, to show dominance, things like that. Fascinating, once you see it applied and showing it applied is something I want to do in this arc.

That offered, let me clarify a bit and describe what's on the horizon.

In Part 1 I hoped to lay the foundation for this arc. I used three "neutralized" email signatures as examples in that post and I didn't explain them because (to me) that would have been a violation of trust.

Let me explain. I didn't ask the people who owned those neutralized signatures if I could use them. Because I didn't ask them and because they or others might recognize the signatures even though neutralized, I won't share our findings on them.

Thus they are there only to show how similar they are and how a pattern develops and is propagated throughout cyber-time and -space.

In Part 2 I start explaining the concepts of psycho-social distance. These concepts are very important to the information and analysis that follows. I also included a caveat that I would be using my own signature file as the example going further. This choice and statement goes back to the reason I didn't offer any analysis of the neutralized signature files in Part 1.

To that end, I've learned to share of myself either not at all or openly, to not be ashamed by what I've done or how I've lived. To do so would be worthless and foolish, don't you think? I've lived as I've lived and nothing I do can change that. Because this is my belief (mind you, I'm not proud of all I've done, merely accepting and understanding of it) I know that some things I share or might share of myself can be troublesome to others. This is the reason for the caveat and the anecdote about my journal writing. Share without being afraid.

In Part 3 I go into detail about passageways distance {oops! this should be "psycho-social distance" Dang spell checker!}.

In Part 4 I provided my signature file as it existed at the start of this arc for the example going forward. I also included a rudimentary analysis of the signature file as it existed. What followed was a "headaches" {should be "heads-up"} if you will of what to look for and how to go looking.

Tomorrow's post, Part 5, will start with what we learn about me from the very start of my signature file. That entry ends with my saying "Ouch!".

Part 6 addresses the question of personality and how it comes through in signature files.

Part 7 addresses what the signature file reveals about the sender's self-concept.

Part 8 addresses the sender's concept of their place in their immediate environment.

Part 9 looks at company tag lines and what they mean.

Part 10 looks at the meanings of multiple affiliations (should they exist).

Part 11 considers the most obvious and direct communication in a signature file, the information block.

Part 12 looks at the caveat that appears at the bottom of many signature files, why it's there and its meaning in the sender's psyche.

The last entry reconstructs the signature file using what we've learned to communicate both better and more completely.

Happy reading and, yes,

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