Communicating Online

So what special tricks are there to communicating online? You may already be a maven of Pinterest or Snapchat or YouTube or Facebook. That's fine. But I want to go over a few basic rules for ways of effectively communicating online. For starters, make sure you have something interesting to say. It's increasingly difficult to get anyone to pay attention to anything online. If it's not interesting, if it's just the same old same old, if it's boring, if it's cliched, trite, people can hit delete or just not look at it in the first place. Let's start with email. If you're emailing someone, let them know in the subject matter exactly what you're talking about and then get to the point. Email is laughed at, scoffed at, is an old medium. Some people have written it off, but it's still the so called killer app for many businesses and many organizations. It's still the way I communicate with a tremendous number of my clients and prospects. So don't knock email. With email you can't be as long as you would in a book, but there's no reason you can't email someone your book as an attachment. It's a way to wet people's appetite to get their attention. There's some things email is not good at. It is not good for communicating criticism, it's not good for communicating sarcasm. It's not good for talking about really heavy serious matters because there's too great a chance that people just get angry, upset, delete it, and shut down all future communication with you. So be very, very careful. There are still times when it's better to talk to someone in person or talk to them over the phone. I do realize there are some generational differences. There are young members of my family, nieces and nephews, who if I call them on the phone, it's as if I walked in them on the shower or something. It's considered such a breach of etiquette. They only want to respond to a text, so you'll have to look at it through the context of the particular person's age group, their cohort, what they do. But even then, be very, very careful about expressing serious matters that are negative or critical, or attacking through email or any social media outlet. Let's move on to Facebook. If you're trying to be sarcastic or saying something negative or attacking on someone else's Facebook page, that is going to be difficult. Don't put anything on Facebook that you wouldn't want the whole world to see and do it in such a way that no matter how it's interpreted, you're still not going to look like a horrible person. That's the problem with so much of what people do put on Facebook social media. Find out how the person you're trying to communicate with likes to be communicated with. I have some clients who would never in a million years return an email from me, but if I respond to something they've posted on LinkedIn, they'll respond right back. I know I can't just send them an email, but I can communicate with them on LinkedIn. Some people will never in a million years watch a YouTube video two minutes out of their day. To watch a simple how to video would seem crazy to them, but they're more than happy to listen to a 30 minute podcast in their car in an audio format. I send them audio. So you've got to figure out how do the people you care about, colleagues, customers, employees, prospects, how do they like to be communicated with? And then you're going to have to come up with messages, create it in a format and distribute it on the format they need. It is time consuming, but unfortunately there's no longer any one size fits all.