I often write about how to rise above the noise in how you communciate with your clients or customers. This time, I thought I’d give you 4 ways to train your folks to ignore you:

1. Think along the lines of 1966: “We just need to send something out, it doesn’t matter what.” You would have thought this thinking would have died around the time of the Bay of Pigs debacle. It hasn’t.

2. Everything is important. That is, you refuse to prioritize what you want to communicate to your constitutency, so every message has the same sense of urgency. Or, rather, every message has the same non-urgency.

3. Use the web like it’s still 1996. Ignore more than 10 years of knowledge about how and why people use the web. A good example of this is adding a blog to your web site when you have nothing interesting to say. Gulp.

4. Expect branding to generate sales. Branding and positioning can give you focus. But you still have to do something. You still have to create a marketing plan. Hopefully, your new branding strategy will translate into DOING something differently. Branding alone, without a strategy to do something new, is an excercise in narcissism. Branding is a word that means nothing these days.