Contact pet peeves, email bankruptcy, unplugging & more

16 July 2007 | Culture, Internet, Marketing, Media, Personal | Comments

A just-opened thread, “How do you Prefer to be Contacted?,” over at Web Worker Daily strikes home and makes me wonder if I have a sense of how I like to be contacted professionally. Now, for the folks unfamiliar with what I do for a living when I’m not blogging, I’m the editor in chief and chief content officer for iMedia Communications: I put folks in digital print and onstage in front of a smart and desirable audience, so a lot of people contact me regularly. I have lots to say on the subject of contact etiquette, but mostly I have a few notions about what NOT to do. To me, these seem like logical general principles, but I admit ahead of time that they might just be brad-idiosyncratic:

Don’t call my cell phone if it’s during business hours. I finally took my cell number OFF my business card when people stopped calling my office line altogether. If I’ve invited you to call my cell either via my outgoing message or personally, then fine, but if I’m on another call, in a meeting, concentrating, at lunch or something similar then I want to give those people the same attention that I’ll give to you when I’m talking with you.

Phone first, then email– never vice versa. A very few PR folks can be slick about it, but there’s nothing so annoying as a phone call when the caller asks, “did you get the email I just sent?” The followup email reiterating the details of a chat, though, is helpful.

Change the freakin’ subject line! First, if you change the topic of a message, then it makes sense to change the subject line to indicate what you’ve done. For me personally, though, after a certain point I’ve probably handed any given topic off to somebody on my team and moved on, so if the email is part of an endless “Re” chain, then I’m likely never to notice it.

Have a clear idea of what you want, who you are and who I am: I don’t mean this in the arrogant, “don’t you know who I am???” sense. it’s OK to reach out just to chat or to set up a time just to chat. It’s also OK to contact me with a concrete request. What’s irksome is when I get pitched by somebody who doesn’t know anything about iMedia or me and who hasn’t bothered to do a little homework. This is particularly annoying when I get spammed with some “story idea” that has nothing to do with the internet or with marketing, which means that the iMedia audience won’t care about it. Years ago, a talented young woman named Tien Teng who works PR for the Sutherland Group did her homework, figured out that she and I had a shared context (I’m not telling what it is) and used it as her opening when she called to pitch a client. I warmed to her instantly because in addition to that piece of research she was generally organized and had a clear idea. She’ll go far.

IM, twitter and virtual worlds… I can’t keep up with email and phone! More and more, I’m darting on and off IM or making dates when I’ll be on.  Maybe it’s because I’m looking down a short barrel at 40, but I can’t keep focused if I have a dozen windows popping up again and again.

I’ve written before about how hard it can be to unplug, and my friend Joseph Carrabis has an infinitely long thread about how tempting he finds the new vogue for declaring email bankruptcy (I think about it every day, myself), and I think the Web Worker Daily thread on contact preferences is wrapped up in how overstimulated we digerati are.