Giving bad news to employees over email.If anything causes me to go postal in the near future, it is going to either be Twitter or email.
Both mediums are great for communicating, if you are a already a good communicator. It is the same across mediums – know your audience, show them respect, speak clearly, and be concise. The problem with each medium is that your audience has now changed to a foreign size or composition, which is unfamiliar. That, and also that giving a computer to a normal person results in retardation.
Email should be pretty well settled by now. We’ve had it for over 20 years, most people have been using it for at least 10 years in the workplace, and any kid born after 1990 has probably had an e-mail account since they could use the Internet. Yet still we have people making unforgivable mistakes in using this familiar technology. Outlined, the ones that get me the most are:
- Giving bad news over email when more personal avenues are available. This makes you look like a coward.
- Sending grossly inappropriate things over email in the workplace. Come on, we don’t realize this is a bad idea?
- Emailing people with a single link and no explanation of why it is worth clicking on. Mark as spam -> delete.
- Sending emails without a subject. If I don’t know whether it is important or not, my default is to ignore it.
- Sending emails with a subject and no body (Subject: “We need to see you upstairs” Body: “”) This is just lazy. If you really want to one-line me, text, chat, or call me. We don’t need an archive of it.
- Being too verbose. Yes, your emails can be as long as you want them to be, but how many paragraphs do you really need to make your point? The shorter it is, the more likely I’ll be to read it.
If you are an offender of those points and can’t evolve your behavior, STOP EMAILING.
Twitter is arguably newer, but people have been working overtime to prove just how quickly they can forget the fundamentals of communication and act like complete idiots. The advantages of Twitter is that it encourages brevity, forcing people to quickly make their statements without rambling.
The disadvantage of Twitter is that people affected with IICD (Inefficient Internet Communication Disorder) fail on every other point of effective communication:
- Know your audience. Your audience isn’t composed of just the people following you. This results in tweeting about things that can later be used to blackmail the twetard into buying additional insurance or a carton of baby snakes.
- Speak clearly. If you are posting nebulous things to Twitter, are being passive-aggressive, or have some hidden agenda behind your tweets, or posting some emotional breakthrough without providing background, you suffer from IICD and are being a twetard. The basic idea is that if I can’t discern the purpose of your tweet, or can smell a hidden agenda, I’m going to light you on fire. See how clearly I communicated my last point?
- Finally, showing your audience respect. Now I’ll admit I’m guilty of this one at times in terms of outright insulting my followers, but hey – following is voluntary, there is leeway here. What is not acceptable is posting anything to Twitter (to the anonymous Internet) which should have first been communicated to an individual or group. For example, reading from your management: “Had to let an employee go today” before anyone has spoken to the actual employees is proof of extreme retardation and will again result in the tweeter being lit on fire.
If you are an offender of those points and can’t evolve your behavior, STOP TWEETING.
And people label geeks as being ineffective communicators? Hah. Geeks don’t get made fun of for being terrible at using email or Twitter.
Managing relationships in social networks is difficult, just like managing real-world relationships is difficult. If someone unfriends you on Facebook, or stops following you on Twitter, is it because of something you posted? If a friend in real life stops talking to you, is it because of something you said? It can be difficult to tell, and the best course of action is probably to ask your friends what is going on, whether on social networking sites or in the real world.
But there is a difference here: the breaking-point status online is binary. Either someone is friends with you or they aren’t, they were following you but now they’ve stopped. And while sites like Twitter and Facebook are happy to tell you when you have a new friend request or a new follower, they sweep under the rug when someone reverses that action – all you notice is you have one less follower, or one less friend. Honestly, it bugs me – and I’m not the only one. Others have written services to monitor a user’s followers on Twitter, but they all fail in some function or another. Qwitter is an example of this – their service is so overloaded that your user only gets hit every couple *months.* Pretty terrible.
Which is why I wrote Lost A Follower. Lost A Follower addresses the problems I’ve described thus far – it is a service that monitors your Twitter profile. When you lose a follower, Lost A Follower gathers your last post to Twitter and the username of the individual and sends them both to you. Now you get a notification sent directly to your email that tells you who stopped following and, importantly, *why.* It is in its initial release right now, so I expect plenty of bugs on the server side – but I’m excited to get it off the ground. I have a lot planned for future versions and extensions of the Lost A Follower platform, but all that will come in due time :)
So if you are a stat-monger like me, or you just wish Twitter would help out a bit with managing your social network, give Lost A Follower a shot. It is free, developed by yours truly, and is currently in need of test subjects :)
I want to open this up with a question posed by j9er on twitter:
j9er Taking cloud computing to its ultimate outcome, does ayone care that, say, Microsoft would have all your data? Or, Google?
My concise response: yes, I care. But the three primary reasons go beyond the 140 characters twitter would allot me.
Unrestricted Access
The big thing that keeps me from being completely comfortable with a third party storing my data for me is whether I would have unrestricted access to my data. Currently, users are even having problems with google disabling access to its user’s gmail accounts. So say Google or Microsoft have all my data, not just my e-mail and some google docs: how are they going to guarantee that I can access my data how I want, when I want, and wherever I want?
Security
Beyond that, security is an issue. On my home system or my personal servers, I can guarantee their security, as I am the sole administrator of my nodes and I am security conscious. Additionally, my personal data is not coveted by malicious hackers. The amount of effort it would take for someone to gain access to my machines externally is definitely not worth the information they would gain access to. However, when the information of millions of users is aggregated into one location, that data becomes extremely attractive. So the second question becomes: how can the company guarantee the security of the cloud, and the security of the information within? (On that note, I highly reccommend the cloudsecurity blog, where they attempt to answer these questions.)
Privacy
The last concern is one I am sure most people familiar with the topic have thought about. Storing information with an organization involves a great amount of trust, and when it is done improperly people raise their voices. (A good example is any time the CIA/NSA/FBI want to merge databases. If you do it without consent, it is an improper collection of information.) Storing information in the cloud therefore needs to be consensual, guarded well, and exposed only to the owner and applications owned by the organization, but never reviewed by humans, and with all personally identifying information scrubbed. The final question therefore is: how can the organization storing my data guarantee my personal privacy?
I care about my data. Especially who has it, who may have access to it, and how it may be used to identify me. Until the questions can be answered and those guarantees made, I won’t be comfortable storing all my data in the cloud.
