No Straw MenEnlightened discourse proscribes arguments that are weak or imaginary, like straw, set up only to be confuted summarily.

Eight Tips to Smarter E-mailing

One month ago, I posted some thoughts on the pros and cons of communicating via e-mail. As promised, I’d like now to outline some best practices that have served me well (even if I’ve learned them the hard way).

Granted, some of these are idiosyncratic, so if you disagree or have additional insights, definitely please let me know.

1. When responding, reply to the original e-mail rather than starting a new one. This way, you minimize confusion about what the original e-mail said, and the correspondence is contained in a single document, which makes everything easy to reference later.

2. Because we send so many e-mails today, it’s tempting to skip small chat and get right to the point. Yet while concision is commendable, being impersonal can often be perceived as being impolite. For this reason, I always begin e-mails with the recipient’s name, or at least a salutation. Compare receiving the message, “How’s XYZ coming along?� to “Hey Jill: How’s XYZ coming along?� This small courtesy acts as a cushion, buffering the professional with a touch of the personal.

3. When to follow-up with someone is, in my opinion, the thorniest issue. Do you wait one day, one week, one month? There’s no right answer here—as always, context is king, and patience is a virtue—but I’ve found that follow-ups are most effective when they include two things: (1) Recognition that your recipient is busy, and (2) A one-sentence summary of what you need.

4. CCing someone’s boss is a good way to get that person’s attention, but a bad way to establish rapport.

5. Perhaps the biggest gripe against e-mail is that it lacks nuance and emotion; it’s difficult to discern tone and body language on a computer screen. This is true, but these obstacles can be overcome in the fingers of a skilled communicator. Consider the standard reply, “Ok.� Does it mean “Whatever,� or “Good to go�? Without really knowing the sender, it’s a tough call. By contrast, a little chattiness—“Not wild about this, but in the interest of making progress, let’s do,� or “Great idea. Go for it�—goes a long way. Thus, to avoid misunderstanding, err on the side of elaboration.

6. In the interest of receiving a decisive response, try to limit each e-mail to a single issue, rather than using the opportunity to cram several questions into a single message. This is not a rigid rule, but it’s been my experience that even when you present a numbered list, people still overlook things.

7. Has this ever happened to you? You’re talking to someone at a party. Another person approaches you both, listens for a minute, and comments when there’s an opening. What makes this encounter appropriate is that at some point the third party usually introduces himself. By contrast, when we send e-mail, it’s common to CC people whom the recipient has never heard of. Isn’t this a bit rude? Is it so cumbersome to introduce the parties (By the way, I’m CCing Julia and Cal, our VP and SVP of government relations�)?

8. Instead of BCCing, forward the given e-mail after you send it. This way, the BCCed recipient can’t “reply to all,� which sometimes happens, thus nullifying the “blindness� of the carbon copy.

Is Personal Branding Overrated?

A version of this blog post appeared on LindsayOlson.com on May 1, 2009.

Would you hire this self-described Internet strategist? He rarely blogs, doesn’t much tweet, and uses YouTube for quick and dirty videos filmed with a Flip camera.

No? Would your mind change if you knew he were a veteran of Microsoft and Yahoo, whom the Washington Post described as “one of the elder statesmen in the … class of online political operativesâ€�? What if NationalJournal.com credited him with expanding the Republican National Committee’s e-mail list from 1.8 million to 12 million, and “dramatically improving the party’s social media outreachâ€�? His name: Cyrus Krohn.

What about this guru? He, too, rarely tweets, much less blogs, and enjoys only 285 Facebook friends. Yet he’s spent the past two and a half years building, from scratch, what the Politico ranks as the fourth best e-mail list in politics. Last year, PoliticsOnline and the World E-Democracy Forum named him one of the “Top 10 Changing the World of Internet and Politics.� His name: David Kralik.

Finally, while our third executive is active on Twitter, he has only 271 followers. He suspended his personal blog more than a year ago, and only rarely comments on the blog he helped found, RedState. His day job? Executive Vice President at Edelman, the largest independent pr firm, where he runs the digital public affairs practice and his clients include Wal-Mart and the American Petroleum Institute. His name: Michael Krempasky.

Clearly, these guys are major players in digital media. They speak at conferences, command sizable salaries, and boast enviable records of accomplishment.

Yet their efforts at personal branding—their own PR—are relatively lackluster. They’re behind-the-scenes operators, who keep their heads down. They’ll give a quote to a reporter, but client work is their priority.

And yet, if these folks were job searching, today’s recruiters no doubt would advise them to raise their own profile—to beef up their LinkedIn page, optimize the search engine results for their names, and start publishing thought-leadership pieces.

This advice is well taken, but perhaps overdispensed. Even if you work in digital media, you need not have 500 Facebook friends, as David All asks of his potential employees. While understanding the medium requires engaging it, you’d do just as well to help a client gain 10,000 Twitter followers than attain this feat for yourself. As Sean Hackbarth can attest, even being a well-connected blogger with nine years of experience does not guarantee gainful employment.

Put another way, Show me what you’ve done for others, and I’ll discern who are.

Addendum: Tim Cameron refers me to another underbranded expert: Blue State Digital Founding Partner and Obama for America New Media Director, Joe Rospars.

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