There were often times I felt that a shovel would have been more effective than my keyboard.

Know what I mean?  Was any of that promoting intimacy?  Or, was I doing more good by putting on my suit coat and taking a partners’ walk?

What, however, about the delivery platform?

My sense is that the more personal the impression, the better.  After all, which are you more likely to remember?

• One of the hundreds of text messages you might get in a day? or
• A face-to-face meeting?

I can offer only a little research to back this up.  Here’s one item .

Actually, what caught my attention was the comment to this linked post:  “Is twitter nothing but a series of text ads put in the context of perceived intimacy?”

The Battle of Jericho, Julius Schnorr von Carolsfeld, 1851-60. Joshua and the Israelites marched around the walls of the fortress seven times before blowing their horns and bringing down the walls.

Looking for a good way to be remembered?  One route is literary.

Another way is more quantitative than qualitative.  More about deployment than style.

I’ll call this one The Rule of Seven.

Most behavioral psychologists will tell you that it takes between about five and seven impressions for most humans to store anything in their long-term memory.  Short-term memory, BTW, lasts about 18 seconds; long enough to remember, for example, a phone number.

In the context of marketing communication and business development, think of an impression as…

• Mailing (e.g., a personal note, letter, invitation, e-mail message, client advisory, blog posting, newsletter)
• Advertisement (including Web sites visits)
• Phone call
• Face-to-face meeting (e.g., social or business, including seminar presentation, lunch, special event, client outing or reception)
• Film or video (such as a YouTube or Facebook posting)

There’s more, but you get the idea.

Why seven?  There is a ton of science that supports the connection between memory and repetition.  Cognitive neuroscience says that it takes repetition (along with other memory enhancers such as sleep) to create stable and permanent changes in neural connections widely spread throughout the parts of the brain that contribute to long-term memory.

Timing is important, too.  Studies show that the spacing of impressions in critical.  The optimal timing to repeat something is when the memory of a name or event begins to fade, roughly 14 to 21 days.

In other words, once is not enough.  In fact, once is a waste.  And remember the importance of variety in how the impression is conveyed, recognizing that all of us absorb information differently…sometimes it’s heard, sometimes read and so on.

The good news is that once is something stored in our long-term memory, it’s there for decades.  Maybe a lifetime.

Then think about two words:

Consistency

and

Repetition

The former is one of the keys to effective branding.  The Marlboro Man, UPS, Apple…ad infinitum.

The latter has been around since the ancient Greeks.  In fact, the title of this post represents one of at least nine ways Greek rhetoriticians codified the repetition of words for emphasis.  (I used epizeuxis — also known as palilogia — literally the fastening together of words.)

So what?  In addition to more engaging writing, repetition figures into how we might deploy what we write.

If, for example, you have an unreadably long something or other you’ve written for clients and the like.  Long as in way over the 250 to 300 word threshold most of us have before we get bored, distracted or multi-tasked onto something else.

A solution? Serialize the main ideas into two or more shorter parts.  Send them out, say, 7 to 10 days apart.  With the same or similar headings, art and the like.  (See Consistency, above.)

Or, if you’re producing Web or blog content, cannibalize the long copy.  Create a new page or a new sub-headed section or a new post.

In addition to being better-remembered, repetition creates a sense of anticipation.  And then, you make your readers part of a conversation.

Part 2?  The Seven Impressions Rule.