It’s the mouthwash principle. And it’s critical to powerful leadership. If you want to make an impact on people, to influence their behavior in some way, you have to keep sharing the message, coming at it from different angles and at different times long after you think you’re done.

During rehearsals for his new Off Broadway play, Storefront Church, John Patrick Shanley rewrote the final scene 20 times before he was satisfied. But it wasn’t until the production’s first preview, on May 16, that he discovered other scenes needed revising too. The evidence came from audiences — the sort of patrons who pay to attend Off-Broadway shows early on and have more power than they may realize to shape new plays, even one by a Pulitzer Prize-winner like Mr. Shanley (Doubt).

So Facebook buys Instagram for $1 billion. Then last week, out of nowhere, Facebook releases the Facebook Camera app--what is clearly the not-so-secret Instagram knockoff they’d had in development for a while now. In other words, Zuckerberg bought the original, and then he started selling knockoffs. A strange move? Maybe, maybe not. It seems to me that Facebook is buying themselves a bit of time, offering consumers better photo sharing on the go while deciding how much or little they should ingest the soul of Instagram (I’m guessing very little).

As an e-commerce company with more than 4 million subscribers to our daily fashion-sale alerts, we keep a close eye on what makes e-mails most effective.

We've sent more than 1.5 billion e-mails since starting our business five years ago and admit to our fair share of mistakes. We've gotten better, but along the way, we've learned a lot about what not to do.

Here are our top seven takeaways:

Last month, I learned what Dian Fossey must have felt like in Gorillas in the Mist, surrounded by mysterious creatures and unknown dangers, and yet compelled to edge ever closer. On my right in full costume was someone outfitted as an adorable, and somehow huggable, green hammerhead robot...in a dress. (I later learned she was in the garb of a Japanese video game character from Katamari Damacy.) At a table in front of me was a young man who just received a free copy of Far Cry 3 for letting Ubisoft, the gaming company, shave his head with a mohawk.

Effective communication never consists of words alone. There must be a purpose behind those words that calls an audience to action. The result of this action is, ideally, identical to what we call a communicator’s objective. Simply put, your objective is the goal or purpose you hope to achieve with your audience as a result of the delivery of your message. A computer sales rep wants to sell a computer, a teacher wants the students to learn their state capitals, and a safety manager wants the workers to avoid injury.

This is a tricky subject, and a difficult one for many nonprofits to address: How can you get your board to raise more money on your behalf? I’m not talking about "show boards," those boards of directors that you asked people to be on just so you could attach their name to your cause (usually well known local people)... you knew what you were getting into there, and it wasn’t having the board doing lots of work.

These days, more Kickstarter campaigns are achieving success than we can keep track of. The iPhone-friendly Pebble watch earned $7.6 million more than its $100,000 goal. And the Galileo iPhone platform closed its Kickstarter campaign at $702,000, far surpassing its $100,000 goal.

Not to mention, Kickstarter recently reported it has raised $200 million from over 2 million backers.

You know that feeling when you see something really cool in action? You see it unfold right before you. Last fall, I had the incredible opportunity of attending in NYC and saw social media and online marketing used so smartly to sell out an event with zero seats to spare and create an enormous amount of buzz for next year’s event. This is what every business needs to know about using social media for a sell-out event, including getting the word out in the first place, strategies for engaging your audience, and how to create momentum after the event.

As my company has been managing pay-per-click advertising since the dawn of the medium, I've been thrilled to turn its attention to the Facebook advertising platform's amazing targeting abilities. We stumbled a lot at first, however, and went through millions of dollars of testing before we learned to walk (and finally run). Here are the five biggest lessons we have learned about using Facebook ads.

Almost 100 years have passed since the first regularly scheduled international flight. It’s been 85 years since the first international telephone call, and more than 30 years since the United Nations standardized passports. While these advances served to connect countries to one another, they have struggled to produce a true sense of global citizenship. To me, global citizenship means identifying with one another as people with a common experience before subdividing by other factors like nationality, religion, or political beliefs.

The default to emotion is part of the human condition.

To better appreciate the role of emotion and what it allows an audience to do, we need to take a brief detour into evolutionary biology. The human brain can be understood as three separate brains working in tandem, if not completely integrated with each other. The primitive brain and the limbic brain collectively make up the limbic system, which governs emotion. Within the limbic system, there is a structure called the amygdala, which leaders need to understand.
 

When you walk to your seat in a movie theater for one of the "Live in HD" broadcasts of the Metropolitan Opera, your experience begins with the sound: the instantly recognizable, immediately comforting hum of instruments tuning and the audience stirring, piped in live from the Met itself. I heard it when I stepped into the Murdock Theater in Wichita, KS last November to attend the screening of Philip Glass's Satyagraha, part of a season in which I traveled throughout the country, attending the Met's 11 HD broadcasts.

Landing pages are a critical tool for meeting your ever-increasing lead generation goals. Actually, only 8 percent of marketers reported that dedicated landing pages were ineffective, according to MarketingSherpa's 2011 Landing Page Optimization Benchmark Report. I'm not sure what those 8 percent are doing, but the effectiveness of landing pages for the other 92 percent of marketers hinges on one component that isn't often discussed -- visitors have to trust you enough to give away their personal information on your landing page forms to obtain your offer.

Fashion Star, a heavily promoted primetime launch, pairs fashion designers with celebrity mentors in a competition to lure the attention--and the purchase orders--of department store buyers. Designs that make the cut are available immediately at one of the show’s three commercial partners--Macy’s, H&M, or Saks Fifth Avenue. With the clothes selling out before West Coast viewers even get a chance to check out the week’s collection, it appears the formula is working.

We all know great design has a critical role to play in building a great brand. But how do we go about making that happen? I recently had the opportunity to speak to three top designers about that very question: Robert Brunner, founder of the design shop Ammunition and author of Do You Matter: How Great Design Will Make People Love Your Company; Joe Doucet, founder of Joe Doucet Studio; and David Hill, vice president of design at Lenovo and author of the Design Matters blog.

Once, art museums were like fortresses. They were built of stone atop forbidding mountains of stairs. Today, museums might be nestled under glass pyramids, or sheathed in undulating ripples of stainless steel, or built to look like boats and the hood of a sports car. A city in China has plans for a comic book museum that's shaped like a speech bubble. Just as the buildings have changed, so have the exhibits inside them. Today museums must compete with a host of entertainment options that didn't exist a generation ago.

Here's one of my current favorite hobbies: I sit down with potential clients, toss out a reference to Google+ and wait for the inevitable reply--that "it’s never going to make it" or "we don’t believe in it." Then I slowly shake my head, take a breath, and reveal what Google isn’t telling you about the importance of their social push.

1. It’s not a social network.

It's every advertiser's worst nightmare: consumers so distracted by a dizzying array of media choices that they no longer notice the commercials supporting them. And its time might be closer than you think. A recent study found that consumers in their 20s ("digital natives") switch media venues about 27 times per nonworking hour—the equivalent of more than 13 times during a standard half-hour TV show.

Image courtesy of lomokev on Flickr

As a marketing professional, I spend a lot of time learning and educating on digital trends. With the current rate of growth, mobile marketing has been one of the most exciting to monitor. The data on user adoption is changing almost daily, with consumers actively changing the way they consume, share, and publish. To keep up with these changes, brands and media companies are regularly making advancements that affect our industry. For this column, I spent some time with my agency's mobile strategy team to define the top four current trends.

Laura Fredricks, a fundraising consultant, say she has noticed a disturbing trend. Too often fundraisers use the same formula to seek a gift, whether they are asking for $10,000 or $50,000, instead of tailoring each interaction with a potential donor to the person’s interests and values. That practice wastes time and ensures poor results.

Creativity is an under-celebrated superpower. You hear a lot in nonprofit circles about the importance of telling stories, of measuring our impact, collecting data on relevant metrics, and learning from experience. You hear a lot about the importance of having a coherent strategy, experimenting, and having a better attitude towards failure, about giving up control, engaging your community.

The closer you are to your customers, the more relevant your product will be and the more likely you make it for people to choose you. It may seem obvious, but the gap between those that do and those that talk is widening, despite the immediate bottom-line benefits. But more than this, companies that put usefulness at the heart of what they do become part of their customers' lives. Engaging with customers then becomes an ongoing conversation, rather than the stop-start involvement that characterized the 20th century.

High tech merged with high culture Tuesday at The Art Institute of Chicago when Google, Inc. announced an upgrade to its Google Art Project initiative, adding thousands of works in dozens more countries.The project provides access to more than 30,000 ultra-high resolution images of paintings, sculptures, and photographs from 151 museums and other institutions in 40 countries.

Spent a lot of time learning about and building out your company's existing Facebook page? Oh well: It's pretty much being upended by March 30, whether you like it or not.

It's starting to feel as if this photo frenzy isn't just a passing phase. Maybe there's some inescapable human affection for pretty pictures. We just can't help ourselves. As Antony Young, CEO of Mindshare North America, put it in his recent column for Ad Age: We're seeing a consumer movement toward a more visual culture brought on by technology and media. Smarter devices are prompting more occasions for people to create and consume visual content, while social media is encouraging that content to be shared on multiple platforms.

My sister-in-law maintains a list on her smartphone of companies she vows never to patronize again. She calls it her "shit list." It includes big national brands and small local companies and spans restaurants, hotels, Internet providers, airlines, retailers--practically any business with a service component. And she's not alone. Practically everyone has a shit list of some sort, whether mental or recorded, and the incidents that get companies onto these lists have one thing in common: They're nearly always preventable.

A small Philadelphia-based company called New Paradise Laboratories is re-creating theater for the connected generation. It's incorporating social networks like Facebook, Skype, and Chatroulette into the production and presentation of shows, pulling theater into the virtual space.

This innovative experience takes audiences through a rabbit hole on a visually stimulating online adventure. Stories evolve on social networks with multimedia components from YouTube and Sound Cloud. It can be hard to decipher what's real and what's fiction.

Recently, my colleagues have gone wild for Pinterest. Pinterest is an online sharing tool that allows you to construct virtual bulletin boards to collect and display images from across the web. While some museums are using the tool in clever public-facing ways, that's not what's happening here at the MAH. At our museum, our programs team is using Pinterest to develop ideas for upcoming community events. As staff members and interns discover intriguing activities, products, or artwork on the web, individuals can "pin" items of interest to the boards for specific events (i.e.

Jeff Rosenblum is drinking tea at Soho House, a private club in lower Manhattan, and explaining to me that most advertising doesn't work, and that the entire advertising industry is stuck in the past and desperately needs to be blown up and reinvented-not exactly what I-d expected to hear from a guy who runs an advertising agency that counts Suzuki, Universal Theme Parks, Capital One, and General Mills among its clients.