Scaling The Levels Of Social Communication

If a picture is worth a thousand words, then what is a tweet worth?

One of the things I persistently tell my staff is “get on the phone!” When trying to get information, sort something out, or close the loop on a contract or task, I really do hate it when people leave things to email when they could so easily pick up and phone and do it right there.

Even when my wife says to me “I’ll text them” I say to her, “why text and wait for an answer when you can get one right away if you call!” The other day I even had someone say to me that they hoped so-and-so got their tweet about their meeting. My answer again was, “Phone?”

We seem to have forgotten sometimes that our mobile phone does indeed make phone calls on top of email and tweeting!

How we similarily reduce Social Media to media

I think we also tend to forget that Social Media is social on top of media. We are trying to build relationships, provide useful experiences, develop connections and communities, create opportunities – but many are functioning on a level that will not get achieve these goals.

The connections that I have – the people that I am collaborating with, who are building with me, who partner financially with me - my communication with them is far more than a tweet. Of course it is! But so many are frustrated when they don’t get this level of connection, when all they are doing is just tweeting.

I keep telling people to Scale the Levels of Communication. What I mean by this is depicted in this model below:

The idea here is that by sending someone a personal email, you communicate at a level that would’ve taken 50 tweets. Not rocket science, but I don’t see many people doing it. (Three people I have experienced who do this exceptionally are Chris Hall, Chris Brogan and Robin Dickinson.)

No wonder people aren’t getting the deals, the contracts, the opportunities – they are just keeping things at the lowest level of Social Media communication!

Anyone who works with me knows I want to make things as personal as possible, as quickly as possible. My preferred method of communication is totally a phone call, because it it conveys passion, enthusiasm, stress, trust, discouragement, stature, confidence, frustration, etc in a way that 10 emails one after the other just can’t.

A phone call means I can talk it through right there and then – and even better – I get to hear your voice. I get to hear how you communicate, rather than just reading it. Even better again is meeting up. If up to 93% of all communication is non verbal (and the rest that is verbal consists mostly of intonation, tone – things that are very hard to translate into writing), then how little of communication are we actually getting through 140 characters!?

Let alone, all the people who are dyslexic, unpractised at communicating in 140 characters, too busy to really get into Twitter, etc. By hiding behind your Twitter client you’re missing so, so much opportunity.

How I practically do this

- If you email or tweet me good or bad news, I’ll call you back.
- I tell people when they meet me to call me.
- If have something important to discuss, I’ll do it over the phone and just use email to set an agenda. I’ll then email you minutes of what we discussed for the record.
- If we’re collaborating on anything, I want to speak to you before we do.
- When I’m connecting with someone, even on a low level, I’m always looking to scale up as soon as I can.
- If I’m building a relationship with you and it’s long distance, and I really want to make it work, I’ll go out of my way to physically meet you (normally that means I run an event and pay for you to come, hey Trey and Olivier?
- While we work together, we’ll have calls at least once a week.

Does this scale? I don’t know. I’ll level with you, my companies are small and I don’t have many clients / partners. But I have a very deep connection with those few, which produces working relationships that I have been able to build incredible things with.

This ‘high touch’ also creates an exceptional level of VIP experience. It’s the same thing that we put into Like Minds for both our participants and speakers. I spoke to all our keynote speakers, for instance, several times in the months leading up, and am still speaking with them now. That’s what makes people call it things like “a conference apart” and “not the same old same old” – because we partnered in this together through regular communication with all involved.

Let me hear from you

Literally, call me. Let’s be doers of the word and not hearers only.

Are you scaling up the levels of communication? If so, how do you decide with who you want scale up? Is it hard to scale up?

Photo courtesy of Pixel Addict