Ping over an email, rattle off a tweet, fire off a text, slip in a status update...all well and good and very fast, but are we not forgetting something? How about a please and a thank you, a little consideration to grammar and a passing thought for how the intended recipient may translate your hastily delivered missive.
Just one paragraph in, and this blog may already have taken on the scowling demeanour of a grumpy old man shaking an Oxford Concise at the gathering hordes of today’s un-educated. But bear with me, there is an important PR message in here if you can just wait for the angry storm to abate.
This all started with good old SMS - the now-humble text message. Very quickly words that had never been even close to abbreviation before were being stripped of characters and left for dead. Sumptious fat phrases had become an anorexic collection of capitals - oh how I didn’t LOL. But, when all was said and done the text message was, generally, an exchange between two consenting mobile-users, its grammatical horrors confined to a circuit board belonging to a friend or family member.
Bring in the next accused - your ubiquitous business communication of choice - Mr Email.
Long ago in the land of dial-up connections and computer monitors the size of a small house, the email was, basically, an electronic letter. It contained the required components to qualify as an online version of something you would happily stick a stamp on and slot in a letterbox. What happened??
I can only assume that as internet connections got faster, as more and more people used this ingenious tool and as inboxes began to bulge, so the common courtesies started getting ditched like a dusty old typewriter.
And now, following a long and painful descent into an electronic world where niceties are for losers and speed trumps pleasantry any day of the week, here we are facing a brusque future where emails mutate into little more than a gruff bark, and I for one am not happy - but I’m guessing you already got that bit.
At best an abrupt and impersonal email may be a temporary personality failure, at worst it can be translated as indifferent and uncaring - traits you will probably apply to dealing with your clients and customers in business - bad news!
Of course I’m not speaking scientifically here and am not backing up my observations and predictions with anything that amounts to proper research, and indeed, most people who email me are pleasant and polite. However, there is definitely an increasing trend towards blunt, bordering on rude.
More recently social media platforms have become very efficient carriers of the disease and we now find the same ill-mannered, poorly considered, messages popping up in all sorts of unexpected places. Of course rude Twitter users can offer a shortage of characters in their defence. Although maybe a few could trade in some of the 140 they use on expletives and crude acronyms for the odd pleasantry?
Yes I’m ranting, but not just at the personal affront I suffer to my delicate sensibilities, but from a business / marketing viewpoint, a lack of courtesy and craft in any communication is heading towards PR suicide. Translate this to the real world, and would you, for example, buy a trolley-full of shopping from someone who doesn’t offer a welcome or engage eye-contact? Oh, sorry, bad example for all Tesco shoppers, but hopefully you get my point.
We should be trying to be pleasant and likeable, not only to customers, but also to suppliers and anyone else we come into contact with in business, both for the sake of our business success and also because it demonstrates an understanding of what should still be an essential of civilised society!
Polite-up dudes!
...and if you would like a little guidance and advice, this is an excellent resource http://www.101emailetiquettetips.com/
Also, this piece by journalist Jill Geisler gives specific scenarios of poor email etiquette - we've all been recipients of at least one or two of them http://www.poynter.org/how-tos/leadership-management/what-great-bosses-know/73589/e-mail-misunderstandings/
