© Bill Browning
Having numerous digital voices (or e-personas) is important when you want to be an efficient and consistent communicator.
Have you ever found yourself in the awkward position when encountering someone at a party, stop-and-chat, or some other sort of event and the other person tells you point blankly, “you never responded to my email.” We’ve all been here and hard the truth is that our excuses (if we even have one) are lame. Socially acceptable ones may include, “I was in the wilderness,” “My kid was sick,” or “My iPhone died.”
I like to think that a reasonable turnaround time for answering an email is 48 hours, unless it’s a Friday afternoon or a matter of extreme urgency. There’s also the case of being busy. Not everyone sits at a desk all day, and if they’re in meetings their phone is usually turned off or set to vibrate. And the turnaround time for a colleague sitting three cubes from you should be pretty quick since, well, they can see you.
We also have different expectations for different types of people in our lives when it comes to communicating digitally. Responding to a friend’s public post on Facebook or Twitter tweet should be crafted carefully because, unless your privacy settings are meticulously selected (most aren’t), hundreds of people can see your response. This has forced most of us to adopt different personalities (or “e-personas,” as I like to call them) – catering to each type of person we need to communicate with.
First you’ve got your real-life self. Hopefully this real-life self closely matches the e-persona you use when communicating with close friends and family (unless you’re a sociopath or asshole of some kind). This e-persona is also adaptable to elements of sarcasm and, sometimes, e-bullying. And since the people you communicate with in this e-persona should know you well, they will have no problem telling you to shut the hell up if you’ve gone too far.
Then there’s the e-persona you might use with colleagues or fair weather friends. Dialogue in emails with these folks should be carefully crafted, especially if you desire that one of those fair weather friends might some day become a close friend. This e-persona might also be used with someone you just started to date.
Lastly, there’s the agreeable, robotic, e-persona. The one you wouldn’t fill in the “To” field in your email until the body was completely spell-checked and revised for proper tone. This is the one we would use when answering an email from your boss, the CFO, or when applying for a job. I should be clear that e-personas shouldn’t be falsifications of our true selves… just different versions.
With all of this there is, again, the importance of turnaround time and the expectations that lie within. If I don’t respond to an email thread or even a direct email from a close friend, they can safely assume that I’ll address it in a text, future phone conversation, or Facebook post. But sometimes I’ll ignore an email from friend completely simply because I thought it was stupid – and I’d tell them so (“respectfully, Mike, your email was pointless and dumb” – in which Mike might respond, “I know, but that link you sent me last week was really a waste of my time.”). My mom will sometimes ignore emails I send to her, but I don’t care – she’ll just follow up with a phone call… her preferred method of communication.
The above examples are the exceptions to the rule. Ignoring emails should not be taken lightly. The 48 hour turnaround time should hold true for everyone else (colleagues, co-workers, bosses, managers, customers, fair weather friends), or else you might come across as careless, inefficient, or untrustworthy.
The same can be said for doing business. Gone are the days of annoying the hell out of customers with overly loud radio commercials and TV ads. And gone are the days of really reeling in some new business with a full size newspaper ad. Even though we might have success with social media and other web marketing efforts, email is still an acceptable tool for engaging with customers, finding out their needs, and promoting the goodness of your products and services. Speaking as customer, if I email a business (or even reach out to one on Twitter or Facebook) to find out about a product or service and they don’t get back to me for a month – well, then, they pretty much suck.
I was born with a hearing impairment that created social, learning, and vocabularic deficiencies. I connected with the language of music and film almost immediately, as they made up for any losses attributed to the fact that I was the “shy kid who can’t hear very well.” I entered college in 1993, just as email had gone mainstream – this was a boon for my growth as a communicator. Yet still there was the struggle of finding a voice. Eventually as a married adult I became a confident person who knows where he fits in and what he wants. Did digital communication help with that? Tremendously.
You can still ignore emails from your friends – just make sure there’s that understanding of “I’ll touch base with you later” in place. It can even make you a more efficient person, leaving more time to respond to emails that hold up to someone’s expectations of you as a colleague, co-worker, employee, or person who he/she might want to marry some day. If you’re a business owner, then email is still a viable tool to use when responding to customers in a very timely manner.
Josh Valentine is Chief Marketing Strategist at Promenade Media and current President of the Maine Marketing Association. He usually responds to emails in a timely manner unless, of course, it’s crap.
