Communication Methods
Volker posted his preferred methods of being contacted on Twitter today, which rang true with myself and reminded me of a couple of incidents of late:
- A friend of Karen's wanted to contact our photographer friend. From what we can work out they did so via his Facebook profile, which I'm guessing turned up via a Google for his name. But he no longer checks Facebook and they've now concluded "He didn't get back in touch, so we've gone elsewhere". They should have asked for his phone number.
- A friend of mine used an @jakehowlett "mention" on Twitter to tell me something of relative importance. Luckily I happened to see it. It should have been an email, SMS or phone call though really.
From my own point of view, unless I've verbally told somebody something I can only assume they might (or might not) have gotten the message.
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This to me only confirms that email is far from dead. All the new hip communication methods only stack on top of it. Mostly there is nothing wrong with the communication tool, it is how about it is used.
Some other examples:
- Meeting chairs rescheduling a meeting or the location very shortly before the meeting takes place.
- People calling me when I do not respond to their email within 30 mins, as if it is a realtime communication tool
- People physically interrupting me although I made it painfully obvious that I do not want to be interruped by sitting in a closed room with headphones on
I could go on and on. Most people are complete idiots when it comes to communication, myself included.
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What really gets my goat is when people send emails without thinking about what they've written.
It's normally people who are busy and think they're being super productive by sending an email reply in 3 seconds flat. What they normally end up doing is raising more questions than they've answered and cause me to send another reply to clarify. Sometimes this happens over and over and can take a whole day (or more) to get an answer to a question that could have been answered in one reply to the first email and within an hour of asking.
I re-read every email (and blog reply on here for that matter) before I send it to make sure it makes sense and has no typos. If only everybody did life would be a lot simpler.
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