Today, all across the Internet there will be messages of love. From Tweets to status updates on Facebook and cryptic messages on YouTube there will be an outpouring of affection on the web. There will also be hundreds of millions of text messages sent out saying something simple like “I luv u”.

In the past, of course, you would send your Valentine a handwritten letter, wrapped up in lace and ribbons. Nowadays lovers resort to a quick message from their mobile phone, with half a dozen characters or a status update on their Facebook page in the hope that their intended will notice…! None of it is very romantic.

Indeed, in a survey in Australia the romantic novel publishers, Mills & Boon, have discovered that these modern ways of professing your love are not loved very much at all. It transpires that what women want is a man to say “I love you” directly to their face. In fact, the women in the survey rather detested men who were focused on their smartphones or who used technology to communicate their passions and desires.

Essentially, the survey shows that face-to-face is still a much-loved method of communication; technology is NOT the best way to communicate in all situations.

But more than this the Mills & Boon study reveals that the key issue is the extent to which the women feel they are being liked by someone. Sending a six character text does not say as much as getting in your car, driving over to her house and saying “I love you” the moment she opens the door. In other words, it is about how much the woman feels she is being focused upon and how much the man is focusing on himself.

Studies consistently show one thing about love and it is the same fact as revealed in research about business marketing: the person who we are trying to relate to, whether a potential lover or customer, feels much more positive towards us when almost our entire conversation is about them.

In other words, if your Tweets are about you, if your website is about you, if your Facebook activity is about you, then you are going to have a much tougher time in romancing your customers than if your web presence is about them. Take a tip from those women in Australia – stop loving yourself and start loving your customers.