The other night, I was reading through the marketing classic, Positioning: The Battle For Your Mind by Al Reis and Jack Trout. In the opening pages, the authors shared this thought:

Consider this: The Lord’s Prayer contains 56 words, the Gettysburg Address, 266; the Ten Commandments, 297; the Declaration of Independence, 300; and a recent U.S. government order setting the price of cabbage, 26,911.

The point they were trying to drive home with these and numerous other examples was that we are in an unbearably over-communicated society.

The thing is though, that book, and those words, weren't written recently. They were written in 1981.

If things were bad in 1981, then how do things rate in 2013? Well:

  • Every minute of every day: 684,478 pieces of content are shared on Facebook; Instagram users share 3,600 new photos; Foursquare users perform 2,083 check-ins.
  • There are 58 million tweets each day.
  • Every minute, 100 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube.

Staggering.

And daunting.

Because the obvious question that flows out of all those numbers is, as an organization, how do you hope to ever cut through all that noise to make any kind of meaningful impression with your audience? Clearly, it can't just be through putting out a clever ad or a new website. It's got to be something bigger. Something more integrated and something more strategic.

We have some ideas. Let's talk.

Andrew VanderPloeg Guest Blogger, Consultant

Andrew served at Bark for over 20 years before recently taking over the role of Vice President of Marketing & Communications at ShareWord, one of our favorite organizations.