Social media is causing a fundamental shift in the way businesses engage and communicate with prospects and customers.

The traditional marketing approach where you get your message in front of thousands of people to net a handful of customers isn’t working the way it used to. The funnel – as this approach is often referred to - is broken.

The funnel is broken for two reasons. First, we all get too many electronic messages. Over the past decade it’s gotten so easy to communicate electronically and our social networks have grow so much that most can’t keep up with the number of daily emails, text messages, instant messages, direct message and all the other messages we get.

The second reason the marketing funnel approach is broken is that social media is reminding us that we prefer to communicate with real people on a one-to-one basis. However, most marketing communications are still generated by databases and aren’t able to measure up to the truly personal nature of social media.

So for marketing, sales and business development professionals the challenge is to figure out how to stand out from the all the electronic messages being sent and how to make a personal connection.

Is the goal of your online social networking efforts to grow your business? If so, at some point your followers, friends or fans will need to know you as more than just another one of their many online “peeps.” The challenge is the average person is bombarded daily by electronic messages from literally hundreds of people who are part of their ever growing online network of contacts.

Now, I’m no Guy Kawasaki – not by a long shot. But even still I recently counted over 173 electronic messages that I received in a single day. Even worse, I only counted emails, text messages, twitter DMs and replies, Facebook messages and Linkedin group communications. Beyond that there are blog replies, voice mails and various messages from other online networks that I’m a part of. Now, again, I’m no Guy Kawasaki and chances are you aren’t either. However, I’m betting you’re facing the same barrage of online communications. Am I right? Consider it for a second. How many electronic messages do you get a day?

Now let me ask another question. How many personal messages do you get via postal mail? You remember postal mail right? It’s the printed stuff that’s sent with a stamp. Now for the purposes of my question I’m talking about truly personal postal mail. Communications that were written and sent by a person you know or know of – database driven direct mail with your name on it doesn’t count. How many of those are you going to have to sift through today? I’m sure you got as many personal postal messages as you did online ones right? <sarcasm>  No? OK than, how many pieces of personal postal mail did you receive this month or this year?

Just in case it’s not totally obvious where I’m going with this I’ll spell it out for you in this paragraph. The average person today gets less than a dozen (yea that’s 12) personal postal messages in an ENTIRE YEAR. By contrast, the average person gets dozens, and in many cases hundreds of electronic messages DAILY. If your hope is that you’ll be able to truly capture the attention and differentiate yourself with another electronic message (and you’re not Guy Kawasaki) the odds are stacked against you in a big way. That doesn’t mean it’s not possible to make a personal connection with an electronic message. However, if you got a personal printed note mailed to you from one of your Twitter followers is there any chance that might stand out more so than say a Twitter direct message? Of course it would because it’s rare and unique.

Now, this isn’t just a theory. I’ve been sending thank you cards and printed notes to contacts I’ve made online for some time and the response has been nothing short of astounding. How astounding? Well, when I take the time to send a truly personal message better than 60% of the recipients respond. Also, for the record, the first time I mail someone it’s usually just after I’ve connected with them online for the first time.  So, initially these aren’t close contacts. For example, I’ll commonly send an “I’m following you on Twitter” card to people that I follow on Twitter that I’d like to connect with off-line.

I suppose if everyone starts doing what I’m doing my postal messages may not work as well in the future. But for now, using personal postal mail to communicate with online contacts is extremely effective and MUST be considered if you’re serious about your social networking strategy.

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