Communication is at the center of human interaction. Marketers are well aware of the importance of communication and it’s no surprise that customer engagement, customer experience, and lifecycle management are  popular keywords today. We have to communicate well to engage our customers and to deepen relationships over time.

Marketers have plenty of collected data residing behind multiple firewalls. The opportunity remains to put this data to use and drive more effective communications. The trouble is, as we’ve been accumulating customer data, the target just shifted. There are more channels than ever that we can use to communicate with our customers and it’s a big challenge to understand customer preferences by channel.

The essential question remains: How do we communicate effectively with our customers?

If that sounds like a theoretical or just plain dumb question, consider this:

Email is the new postal service. Come rain, shine, or snow, it’s the core communication vehicle for most people. Of course when the “cloud” has a stormy period and outages occur, business grinds to a sudden halt.

Meanwhile, conversations are sparked through LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, SMS, and the occasional comment stream in a corporate blog.

Where conversations start says a lot about where they should best be maintained. I don’t know if this is scientific, but it sure is practical.

LinkedIn messaging is often indicative of newly formed relationships. Sometimes though, we get messages, invitations, and read questions from trusted friends who prefer to communicate within this social network, and it takes effort to move the stream to email.

The same thing happens in Facebook. For those who consider their Facebook page as their entry point to the internet, conversations flourish “on the wall”.

Direct messages in Twitter often deliver the substance that some people think is otherwise lacking in the microblogging format. Information is shared that would (should) never be in the public timeline, making it a great vehicle to collect opinions of high reliability.

Closer and more personal connections tend to share via SMS, and there are folks who leave their favorite IM package open all day in substitute for SMS. Conversations as well as file transfers are facilitated. Skype is becoming more powerful in this area.

The simple act of setting up a meeting these days carries with it an overhead factor that is fueled by channel choice. “Overhead” is defined as the time required to organize call participants, set up conference lines, confirm with everyone, and then remain flexible to accommodate fluid schedules. Think about how much time and effort you have spent to organize your last few conference calls. Not the recurring sales call on Monday morning, the call with the newly formed project team or with a prospective client or partner. I’ll bet 20-30 minutes could be absorbed to organize a one hour call.

Calls and meetings on my own calendar over the past month have been originated and organized via LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, SMS, Skype – yep, everything except Foursquare. Have you noticed the same phenomena in your business day?

Shift your attention back to the original question…how do we communicate effectively with our customers? The old saw of making the “right offer, right person, right channel, right time” has taken on another dimension as channel choice has exploded.

The bad news is that finding the right combination to perfect communication is more complex. The good news is that the opportunity to solidify relationships and build trust when you get the combination right is more potent than ever.

In a world where points matter less and building trust matters more, you must rationalize a way to  engage your customers through the channel of their choice in order to put the magic back in your communications stream.

Designing strategic marketing plans, I take comfort in using a proven planning methodology as I am assured of covering every aspect needed to create and launch an effective Customer Strategy. In other words, I am always sure to thoroughly vet client project objectives, customer needs and behaviors, the proposed value proposition to engage the group, and so on.

One key part of the planning process is to establish the communication strategy. What messages should be sent via which channel and how often are the starting points in an evolving plan. It was not so long ago when clients and their advisors rushed to email as the silver bullet for efficient and low cost communications within a Loyalty Marketing program.

Innovative at the time, it now seems old hat. Messages could be sent to broader groups at higher frequency at minimal cost using the digital channel. The money to be saved on printed catalogs and other correspondence was enough to have all the financial interests of the business salivating.

What I learned over time is that email is a wonderful means of communication for some, but not all Loyalty program members, and that there was still a place for print materials to accompany digital communications. The clients who insisted on the low cost channel despite encouragement to remain inclusive usually suffered over time and returned to a multi-channel approach.

We are witnessing another threshold being crossed as Web 2.0 has made available several new means of communications, many of which are worthy of trial but none of which are likely to shape up as the werewolf-killing silver bullet.

The sprawling growth of social networks has enabled people to talk beyond SMS and within networks including Facebook, LinkedIn, Digg, FriendFeed, and lots more. Twitter has small volume to date compared with Facebook traffic, but usage is growing and the cognoscenti are exchanging some seriously valuable information, not just what they ate at lunch.

Reflecting on my own introduction into the social networking world, I see a myriad of possibilities. The vast majority of members in long standing Frequent Flyer, hotel, and retailing sponsored Loyalty programs are most accessible by email. To generalize, Boomers are likely to respond to direct and email with a growing percentage paying attention to Facebook and other social networks.

If you are targeting Generation Y in your Customer Strategy, the see-saw swings the other way and it is likely that you would consider SMS, Facebook, and Twitter as tools to create an online brand presence and to open up real time feedback networks.

Long standing Loyalty Marketers have used the term “Dialogue” to describe their interest in establishing two-way communication between company and consumer. In some ways, nothing has fundamentally changed, only that we have more channel choice in today’s world. We have to recognize that not every consumer wants to talk with us in the same way or through the same channel.

How we create our online presence within Social Networks and select channels appropriate to the audience will have strong influence on our ability to build brand loyalty in the future.