Watch Your Digital Manners
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by Gwendolynn Gawlick, PRDiva.com
- Casual Everydays: Email is a more casual mode of correspondence than the traditional business letter. No return address or date is required, since it’s contained in the email, and it’s more acceptable to skip the salutation and just use your recipients name.
- Keep it short: The casualness of email follows through to length. It’s generally accepted that a one or two line email is plenty if it gets the message across. There’s no need to add chatty pleasantries, and inquiries about the family’s health in a business email.
- Love, John: Use your signature wisely and politely. Think of it like business or personal stationery letterhead. Use it for contact information and pertinent news -- not as a soapbox. Your signature line should be short and to the point, and not add unnecessary length to your email.
- DON’T SHOUT: Remember, using all caps in email is considered shouting.
- Getting attached: It’s considered bad form to attach a document when you don’t know the recipient well, or have not asked permission. You don’t know if the recipient has the software to open the document, and attachments are notorious virus carriers. When possible, put the document in text form in the email. When that’s not possible, send email asking if an attachment is okay.
- Learn the Language: Online communication has a lingo all its own, and it pays to know what the basics mean. Here are a few examples:
- LOL: laugh out loud
- ROFL: rolling on the floor laughing
- BRB: Be right back -- for online chatting
- BTW: By the way
- TTFN: ta ta for now. (Read your Winnie the Pooh)
- BCNU: Be seeing you
- F2F: face to face
- ;-) wink and smile
- IMHO: In my humble opinion
- LOL: laugh out loud
- Hop to it: People do tend to expect speedy response from email. Try to answer your mail at least twice a day, even if just to let them know you won’t be answering soon. Set up the ’vacation email’ if you’ll be away from your computer so that people know they won’t be hearing from you until you return.
- What’s Your Point? Use your subject line to your advantage. Remember that most email programs only show about 8 words of the subject line, so keep it short. It’s a service to both you and the recipient to put the most direct, succinct information possible in your subject line. Your mail will likely be responded to more directly, and less likely to be lost.
- Blind Leading the Blind: BCC is an abbreviation hang over from typewriter days. Blind Carbon Copy (BCC) in your email address field means that the TO: recipient won’t see the addresses in that field. It’s not polite to show all the email addresses of your recipients to each other unless they all know each other already, or are working together. Use the BCC field particularly if you are mailing to a long list of people.
- Careful careful: Remember that anything you say in an email can not only be preserved in electronic eternity, but can be passed around to hundreds of people at the press of a button. Don’t write and send anything you wouldn’t want anyone else to see.
- A little skepticism please: The urban myths about sick children in England wanting to receive email from around the world; the wise words from gurus; the good luck that will come to you if you forward this message; the funny blurb from Erma Bombeck. How many of these have you seen? How many did you want to spend your time opening and reading? Think twice before sending these along to your email lists.
- Delete Delete Delete: When responding to comments in mailing lists, delete the irrelevant parts of the original message, and just use a ’reminder line.’ And definitely don’t just hit reply on a digest version, you could be including the entire digest in the next issue. It’s confusing, irritating and makes the new digest impossible to read.
- Douse the Flames: Try not to get involved in flame wars in discussion groups or on bulletin boards. If you must argue, take it to personal email with your adversary, but don’t subject the rest of the participants to your personal gripes.
Most of us use e-mail every day, and many of us use chat and instant messaging to communicate with colleagues, friends and family. Digital communication is becoming an accepted way to do business and correspond, but are our digital manners up to par? As e-mail becomes more and more a part of our work and personal lives, the culture surrounding it evolves as well. The reality however, is that e-mail communication has become both necessary and popular so quickly that many of us haven’t had the chance to learn all the ins and outs of good digital manners. Here’s a little primer on basic etiquette and protocol for online communication in the new millennium.
