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By far, the most important thing is to understand your recipient's preference, not the technical merits of a particular medium/protocol. I'm active in several
by Encosia 13y ago
By far, the most important thing is to understand your recipient's preference, not the technical merits of a particular medium/protocol.
I'm active in several tennis leagues locally. Between arranging team practice, scheduling flex matches, putting together pick-up practice matches, etc, I spend a lot of time communicating with a diverse group of folks about last minute planning updates. Though I generally prefer email for most things since it immediately pushes to my phone just the same as a text or IM, it's been interesting to discover the wide range of preferences that other people have.
Some people are 100% email, period, and will respond to emails from red lights, just a few minutes away from meeting you in person.
A surprising number of people in their 30s and 40s do not have Facebook accounts (not out of privacy concerns, but general disinterest), completely ruling out Facebook messages/IMs.
Some people do prefer text messages, but I haven't found that SMS guarantees any particular immediacy. Some people actually reply to their emails hours quicker than their texts.
A few people I've dealt with share a single email account with their spouse and/or only check email once or twice a day (which blows my mind on both counts...). I'm talking about people young and active enough to play competitive tennis too, not your grandparents. In one of those cases, I can get in touch with the guy in real-time almost every time by using iMessage.
A few people insist on Skype, Google Hangouts, WhatApp, or some other proprietary network. Guess what? If I want to get in touch with them ASAP, I suck it up and use their preferred network.
Maybe the weirdest one is there are a few people I can most reliably get in touch with via Twitter DMs, even though I have their phone number.
Point being, selecting an optimal set of communication protocols almost always fails when that set of rules comes in contact with the real world. If you really want to get in touch with people immediately and consistently, you have to tailor your approach to the person.
- blowski 13y agoThis is an excellent point. Perhaps putting your preferences on your email signature, your profile on the corporate intranet, or your personal website's 'contact me' page would be helpful. Also, it can be good to explicitly define a company culture. I've worked in some places where I'd receive "VERY URGENT" emails, and others where email was used merely as a 'cover your arse' policy but everything else was done in person. FWIW, I prefer to have a conversation in person (or over the phone) and follow this up with an email - even for very short conversations. I like to be prodded via SMS. I hate IM (short conversations turn into long conversations that I can't search later), don't use Facebook or Twitter. But only about 10% of my conversations happen in the way I want them to.
- cema 13y agoPerhaps putting your preferences on your email signature, your profile on the corporate intranet, or your personal website's 'contact me' page would be helpful. Perhaps it would, if more people paid attention to that. I tried it. Works with some but not all.
- read 13y agoPerhaps it doesn't work that well because people don't have any software that can pay attention to that automatically.
- paul_f 13y agoI am an email first person. What I find funny is people who want something from me, and don't email me, and then get mad when I don't respond quickly using their preferred method.
- stollercyrus 13y agoI see what you're saying and agree that it is unfortunately unrealistic. I still feel like life would be easier if we all used the same convention.
- greenyoda 13y ago"Some people do prefer text messages, but I haven't found that SMS guarantees any particular immediacy." Forget immediacy, SMS doesn't even have reliable delivery. According to Wikipedia: "SMS messages are generally treated as lower-priority traffic than voice, and various studies have shown that around 1% to 5% of messages are lost entirely, even during normal operation conditions, and others may not be delivered until long after their relevance has passed. The use of SMS as an emergency notification service in particular has been starkly criticized."[1] Compare to e-mail, which will make repeated attempts to deliver your message and notify you if your message couldn't be delivered. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SMS#Unreliability https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SMS#Unreliability
- stollercyrus 13y agoIf it's urgent, wouldn't it make sense to just call?
- squintychino 13y agoIt definitely makes sense. But it seems people have forgotten that phones are capable of making phone "calls" and just use the text/internet features.
- Encosia 13y agoThere's a difference between something urgent and something that's merely time sensitive, I think. In my example of scheduling tennis practice, updates need to be timely, but they aren't urgent enough to warrant spending time on the phone with everyone involved. Firing off a few asynchronous messages actually means the last few people I would have called get the information quicker than if I had called each person individually. Voice calls are great for a lot of things, but are slow, tedious, and unnecessarily single-threaded when it comes to plenty of time sensitive communication needs.