Sunday, July 5, 2009

Talking to Everyone = Talking with No One

It was not long ago when communicating with another human being required some effort. You needed to invest at least one visit… letter… phone call… or fax for each contact. Today, we have the power to communicate with more people for less than ever… Less time / Less Money / Less Effort. As a result, countless people abuse this Power of Communication by contacting as many people as frequently as possible.

When you are in a store, and you hear someone announcing, “All available cashiers to the front!” what happens? Either every cashier comes up or no cashiers come up… because the request was too generic. Many of us recently received “Happy 4th of July to all of my friends!” messages. They were nice (at least someone cared enough to copy & paste our names into an e-mail blast)… The ones that meant the most to me were the one or two messages that simply read, “Stephen, Happy 4th of July!” because they were personalized for me.

The only thing worse than receiving generic messages from strangers… is receiving them from ‘friends’.

Challenge: The next time you plan to treat everyone in your address book with equal indifference… decide which people deserve something better.

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