A few years ago, Palm stopped talking to consumers. The silence lasted for more than a couple of years. Even though the company’s Treo smart phones still boasted passionate fans, and it still put out decent iterations of the device, for some reason consumer communication all but ceased.

Then the Palm Pre came out last year, to as much fanfare as the company could muster. The Pre was excellent, a stud of a device. The problem was, Palm was starting from zero. Consumers had moved on. Former Palm evangelists (in its glory days, Palm had countless consumer evangelists) went to the iPhone, and the Blackberry, and the Samsungs and the HTCs.

For years, there had been no communication coming from Palm. The customer base was gone. There was no inertia, no momentum, no foundation, nothing to build on.

(Once the communication started, its centerpiece was a series of weird, new-age yoga-Yanni commercials. It should have featured consumers thrilled for the opportunity to own another Palm device,  like Microsoft’s recent terrific spots. But this is a topic for another post.)

On its Web site today, about a year after the Palm Pre was introduced, Palm is touting the Palm Pre Plus, and the Palm Pixi Plus. Do you think consumers know these products exist? Do you think one in five consumers can name the latest Palm smart phones?

I don’t either.

The fatal sequence began not when Palm stopped innovating, but when it stopped energizing and exciting its consumers. Consumer attention shifted to companies which fought harder and more aggressively for it than Palm.

Palm was outworked, and out-communicated.

When you stop talking to consumers, you will lose them. Maybe forever.