Find your technology mix - and stay human

There are growing numbers of people who prefer technology to communicate rather than speaking to you. It’s unfortunate because it can be such an incomplete and inefficient communication method.

Have you noticed it’s a lot easier to be aggressive in an email, especially compared to talking face-to-face?

Sure, technology allows you to communicate news which isn’t popular and shields you somewhat from backlash. It can also be a coward’s way out. Breaking up with someone via text or resigning a job is discourteous and surely spits in the face of the relationship you have built up. Someone emailing you with a catch line of “call me” doesn’t engender you wanting to call them at all, does it?

This may sound like I am advocating moving back to life BE – before email. Far from it. We need to embrace all forms of social and business communication but must learn to use them in a way which gives us the most clout and still remembers the conventions of being human.

I want you to stay human. Don’t let technology take that away from you in your dealings with others, even if it is over the bandwidth.

If someone makes the first overture to you electronically, take their cue. If a client chooses to communicate this way, they have made a choice to be separate from you. They are looking for a little safety, if only initially. Push them too hard and they might disappear altogether.

In our business, we have the opportunity to leverage a mix of ways to interact with our clients. Using them properly – and targeting the audience who respond best to each medium – gets us the best results.

I encourage our sales people to email a client report on the Monday after their home opens on the weekend. No one has to wait for a posted document or a mutually convenient time to physically hand it over. The client can digest it and a follow-up call on Tuesday further cements the relationship and offers forum for discussion.

There’s a level of decorum which must apply to communication for it to be effective. Hide behind it to your own detriment, because when you are building relationships it can stop a lot of good communication simply because people aren’t necessarily deft enough with the written language.

We reveal so much more with things like body language and our tone of voice so at some point, there’s nothing like meeting belly-to-belly. People want to experience empathy, trust and understanding and you can’t do that in the same way via an electronic medium.

Looking someone in the eye, a firm shake of a hand or a round table discussion to ascertain a position can work perfectly in tandem with initial discussions done via email.

An expressive personality will want to do coffee right away but the analytical person will prefer an email to digest things before talking it through. Recognise the kind of person you are working with and use the communication tool which gets the best outcome. Not everyone is the same.

Ultimately, whether it’s Twitter, email or Facebook, they all have their strengths. There is a place for all of it but to engage effectively you have to understand them and find the right combination for you and your clients.

Like it or hate it, these days, it’s an essential part of your business equation.