Eric Butow - Digital Etiquette For Dummies

If you have no form, consider adding a chatbot (a program that simulates and processes human conversation, in other words) to your website so that people can ask basic questions and the chatbot’s artificial intelligence, or AI, can provide friendly answers. Plenty of chatbots are available, and you may have heard of some of them, like Netomi ( www.netomi.com ) and Zendesk ( www.zendesk.com ).

You need to put a face to your name so that people can know that you’re a real person. They will not only be more inclined to do business with you but will also know that your business is real.

Be sure to add a face to your name on social media, too — especially on business social media sites like LinkedIn.

When you make appointments with your business contacts online, be aware of the time zone of the other person. When you’re going to meet online with someone in a different part of the world, you need to check with that person and make sure that the agreed-on time works for them. (4 P.m. in the wintertime in New York City is not 4 P.m. in London; it's 9 P.m., and you don't want to be calling then.) Though a good time for you may be the early morning hours, that may be nighttime for someone else, so be sure that the other person is a night owl.

This is true even if you’re in the same country. If you’re in California, which is in the Pacific time zone, and you want to meet with someone in the Eastern time zone (three hours ahead of you), be sure to set a time so that both of you are in the office and not at home, in traffic, or at lunch.

The same reminder about time zones applies for email messages. If you’re expecting a response right away from someone halfway around the world, you may be frustrated until you realize that you sent the message when the other person was fast asleep.

To follow up on our suggestions about time zones, be sure to stick to business hours. This has become such an issue in the workplace that Portugal established a law forbidding bosses from contacting employees outside working hours: www.cnbc.com/2021/11/15/portugal-bans-bosses-from-contacting-employees-outside-working-hours.html .

Yet there may be times when you need to contact someone outside of working hours because of a genuine emergency. As always, think of these scenarios ahead of time and work with your team to set the ground rules for communicating while you’re at home.

Even if you’re not working with a team, speak ahead of time to the person you plan to talk with so that you both can understand when you’re going to contact them online by way of either Zoom, web chat, or email.

In sum, set expectations ahead of time. No one likes to have their off time interrupted and have to delay telling their kids bedtime stories because your boss or one of your team members thinks it’s okay.

Online communication is primarily a written medium, and though you may meet using Zoom or another online video app from time to time, you don’t want to do that all the time. In a corporate environment, you’ll likely chat with each other via text in a collaboration app like Slack or, for better or worse, email messages.

With email, you have the benefit of not having anyone else read your message until you’re ready to send it. (We won’t visit the horror of accidentally pressing the Reply All icon.) The bad news is that many people — and you may be one of them — believe that they’re better writers than they are. So they think they can just bang out a message and send it.

You don’t have the benefit of having an editor with you, the way we do with this book, but you do have the ability to take a break, focus on another task for a little while, and then reread your message. We think (heck, we know ) that you’ll be shocked by what you find as you proofread.

Don’t be surprised if you delete a lot of unnecessary words and maybe replace some of them with new ones that sound better. And you may be surprised to find that you may not want to send the message, after all — you may want instead to think about what you really want to say and then write a different version later. You’re allowed to do that, you know.

Well, what about writing in a live chat or texting? Here’s our simple advice: Keep everything short and sweet, but not so short that people may have trouble understanding you — that is, don’t write acronyms and abbreviations in place of every other word!

If you grew up during the 1990s and beyond, you know what the acronym TMI means: too much information. Yet a lot of advice floats around the web saying that you have to be authentic because that’s what people like — especially younger people.

What’s the balance? Here, too, we have some simple advice. Just ask yourself one question: Does what I’m about to explain about myself further the conversation and help make my point to my co-workers and/or customers?

If you talk about how you grew frustrated by your computer’s slow speed and so you developed a design for your app that solved the problem, that’s a great way to make a connection. But if you talk about how terrible your life is with no purpose to it, it comes across as unprofessional and can cost you customers, your job, and maybe your business.

Tips about proofreading, conducting meetings, and refraining from telling your life story are all well and good, you might say, but how about day-to-day conduct? We’re glad you asked, because we have four ideas for dealing with that subject. Read on.

If you’re using online communication tools, you have to follow some rules of the road. For example, on a social media platform, you shouldn’t engage in behavior that another person finds harassing, because it will be reported to the platform’s help staff and you might find yourself banned.

You should familiarize yourself with these rules, but you may want additional guidance and motivation. Try these three strategies:

Look at how others communicate before you start communicating yourself, if you can. For example, see how different people communicate in a Slack chat before you chime in so that you can get a feel for the environment and how the discussion is going. If the discussion is more formal, use more formal language. If it’s more easygoing, you can switch up your communication accordingly.

Look on the web to understand how other people communicated effectively in Zoom meetings or email messages or whatever other medium you’re interested in. If you’re a fan of Tom Hanks, let’s say, you’ll have no trouble finding examples of how he communicated on the web. The same goes for how to find examples of businesspeople who communicate effectively with their customers.