Students

Will your next email or post pass the 'billboard test?'

Avnet CIO Steve Phillips, a featured speaker at the recent Association for Information Systems Student Chapter Conference, recommends against writing anything in an email or making a digital post that you would not want to see on a highway billboard. After hearing the talk, department chairman Michael Goul found himself thinking more carefully about electronic communications. After exploring the topic further, he concludes that every message you send should reflect your core values.

2014-06-06

By Michael Goul  |  Chairman, Department of Information Systems

In our last knowIT newsletter, we reported that CIO Steve Phillips of Avnet spoke to attendees of the 2014 Association for Information Systems Student Leaders Conference hosted here in Tempe, AZ by the Information Systems Department’s student club: DISC.

In conveying to the nation’s student IT leaders some personal advice he has found valuable in his career, Mr. Phillips referred to the ‘billboard test.’ He recommended never writing anything in an email or making a digital post that you would be uncomfortable seeing on a highway billboard. This is excellent advice, and I found myself from that very day thinking more carefully about my use of electronic communications. I thought about my email, blog posts and features I’ve written for knowIT. In short, I found I learned a great deal from Steve’s message that day.

The Radicati Group, Inc. estimates 137 billion business emails will be sent each day by the end of 2017. Consumer email is on a downward trend, but that traffic is shifting to text messaging, mobile instant messaging and social networking. Clearly, there’s loads of opportunity to apply the billboard test in both commerce and personal email or posts.

Looking back

At first, I thought about looking through my historical emails just to see if there were some I’d sent that failed the billboard test. I was sure there were times when I was too clever or cynical about something — something I’d written that I wouldn’t want up on that proverbial billboard. And there were times when my communications could be taken out of context. There are emails I sent when I was ticked off, tired or maybe just grumpy. This retrospective tactic had me feeling a bit down — I didn’t have time to find and then follow-up on all the emails and posts I might find that would fail the billboard test.

A go-forward strategy

So next I felt there might be a more proactive route — to think more about what it is I am writing and conveying starting today. And so, from now on, I’ll take the time to go through a mental double check before hitting the send key. For this, I needed some guidance. Google helped — a search for email do’s and don’ts provided for some interesting reading.

I found one document posted at a Microsoft site that reminded me to proofread — and to not simply trust my spell checker. It said to always think of the email you send as a company record, one that is discoverable. It advised me to be aware of the kinds of emails that backfire — the ones that might have embedded irony, sarcasm, certain kinds of humor, etc.

But I found one of the recommendations especially striking: I hadn’t thought about emails that can annoy. They are the ones that might be snarky, incomprehensible, weird, confusing, repetitive and unnecessary. The advice? When you double-check before you hit send, ask yourself, “would I want to receive this message?” After all, we all know what would likely annoy us. I also found that the Emily Post Institute — yes, it’s affiliated with that Emily Post of etiquette fame — has a list of email do’s and don’ts.

One thing here that hit home was to be sure to double-check addresses. Further, a solid and relevant subject line is important. The Post site says to watch your use of emoticons — those graphical images that seek to add context by conveying emotions. Sometimes I wonder what that little winking eye can mean when I receive it from someone I don’t know that well. And abbreviations that are now famous in text messaging can leave some business email recipients trying to decipher what they might assume to be a typo.

Another site reminded me to never send an email when I am angry or grumpy, and to be even more polite in email than when I speak face-to-face.

Some email reading do’s and don’ts

While most of my research turned up do’s and don’ts related to sending emails, one set of advice from an ABC Training Solutions site guided me in how I should read emails. I hadn’t thought about it, but when I’ve ignored cleaning things up by regularly deleting irrelevant emails, I can get a big backlog.

When I have to take the time to clear that backlog and then start to write the emails I need to respond to for work, an inordinate amount of time spent to delete the junk can actually impact my mood for dealing with the important things. The advice — deal with email at set times of the day, remove the unwanted ones regularly by asking the question, “why do I need an electronic copy of this?”

Setting a time at the end of the month to get rid of unnecessary emails is a good idea, too. One of the most important pieces of advice from ABC Training Solutions Ltd: if one feels a negative emotion after reading an email, give the sender the benefit of the doubt and assume there has been a misunderstanding. There’s always the phone, or maybe even a short walk down the hallway to clear things up. Avoiding Ping-Pong emailing can reduce stress and help to make all those involved more productive.

An email successful people never send

Steve Jobs always sent short emails. Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos sends what the Huffington Post calls “unnervingly short emails." Bezos receives many emails, and he is famous for forwarding them to his employees with one single character added: a question mark.

Employees evidently dreaded receiving that “?” email. There’s now a website created by Mike Davidson who is on a mission to change how we email. The site is here, and it says, “five.sentenc.es is a personal policy that all email responses regardless of recipient or subject will be five sentences or less. It’s that simple.” The message here — the type of email you don’t want to send is a long one. On that count, I know I am personally guilty.

For example, I was putting together a conference and was on a search for a well-known keynote speaker. After going round and round with myriad experts — many of whom the conference couldn’t afford due to speaking fees — I tried Dilbert. I sent a long email to Scott Adams, Dilbert’s creator, to see if Dilbert could speak at the conference — my hope was that Scott would be willing. I received a three-word response: “Dilbert doesn’t speak.” Now I most certainly group Dilbert with the most successful people.

Bottom line

Use the billboard test. Double-check before you send. Follow some basic rules: mainly don’t send something you wouldn’t want to receive. And one more thing that CIO Phillips told the students: “Live by your core values.” With every email or post, we need to demonstrate that we are doing just that.  

KnowIT