Think Before You Send

Issue No. 3

June 2007

Dear Colleagues:

Which is cheaper? A $600, 1.5 hour workshop or one of the following: a harassment claim, the loss of a client, or a corporate lawsuit?

While I can't guarantee none of these bad things will happen if you take my Effective E-mail workshop, I can promise that your staff will be more careful and more effective communicators when they leave the session.

That is, assuming they actually participate, and don't spend the whole time checking their Blackberry, Treo or other addictive messaging device.

Think Before You Send

This headline, above, is the most important advice in Send: The Essential Guide to Email for Office and Home, an entertaining and thoughtful book about the blessing and curse of our most common form of business communication.

If we all just took a little more time before hitting the send key we might:

Save a reputation (perhaps our own)

Save a marriage or friendship

Save your job

Save yourself or your company from a lawsuit

Written by two noted journalists, Send is a guide to modern-day etiquette, effective correspondence and a chronicle of alarming trends and incidents in our everyday communication.

Of course, you could learn much of this first-hand by taking my Effective E-mail workshop, but even if you don't, please read this book. The world will be a better place if we all take the advice of these authors to heart.

Learn more at the Think Before You Send Website.

Just Say No to CrackBerries

I learned electronic etiquette years ago, when we only had cell phones, in my tale of two bosses. One boss was a Very Important Person. So important that he was always interrupted by other Very Important People, apparently more important than the person he was meeting with because he had to step out of the room to take calls and handle Very Important Issues, leaving junior staff to take over.

At my next job, I worked for someone who treated his clients as Very Important People. When he entered a client meeting, he turned off the cell phone and spent the entire morning handling the Very Important Issues he was getting paid for, paying attention to and providing counsel solely to that client. At lunch he checked messages and returned only the most urgent calls.

True, that was in the dark ages, more than five years ago, but which person would you rather meet with? Technology has advanced, but good manners are timeless, and perhaps even priceless.

Exclamation Points: The Pompoms of Prose

That meeting was great!!
We're looking forward to working with your team!
Thanks for taking time to answer my e-mail!
I really appreciate your input!!

If your e-mails look like this, you may suffer from exclamation point excess. In our attempts to insert feeling, we often end up jumping up and down, shouting out loud, and waving our pompoms like a cheer squad that pops up every time we send a message.

Consider what the experts have to say:

Woe is I by Patricia T. O'Connor
The exclamation point is like the horn on your car - use it only when you have to. A chorus of exclamation points says two things about your writing: First, you're not confident that what you're saying is important, so you need bells and whistles to get attention. Second, you don't know a really startling idea when you see one.

The Associated Press Stylebook
Use the mark to express a high degree of surprise, incredulity or other strong emotion.

The Elements of Style by Strunk and White
Do not attempt to emphasize simple statements by using a mark of exclamation. The exclamation mark is to be reserved for use after true exclamations or commands.

The Chicago Manual of Style
An exclamation point (which should be used sparingly to be effective) marks an outcry or emphatic or ironic comment.

Citizen Marketers: The Next Billionaires

Apparently, the creators of the next YouTube or Amazon will become billionaires with no help from those of us who make our living in the marketing professions. A recent Newsweek article, Meet the Next Billionaires, describes the reasons it is so inexpensive it is to start a tech company today, including the following:

"And there's no need for a marketing budget when you've got Internet word of mouth."

Viral marketing is cheap and powerful, and anyone can put up a Web site these days. You can even use keywords and paid services to drive traffic, but once someone has arrived, what quality of product do they get? Many start-ups confuse page views with profits.

No doubt there are some multi-talented entrepreneurs out there who can do it all, but for the rest of us, an up-front investment in marketing basics will provide a solid foundation for the big idea. Think of it as the Home Depot approach: You can do it. We can help.

Read the full Newsweek article here.

Learn More

Thanks for taking a minute to read my newsletter. If you think your team would benefit from one of my workshops, I'd welcome the opportunity to talk with you about it. In the meantime, be well and write well.

Learn More