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Saturday, January 31, 2009

Know When to Send an E-Mail, Fax, or Formal

Impact, reference, speed, and distribution are the key criteria. Let's take them one at a time: Impact: It's an image decision: tux or blue jeans. Protocol may demand a formal report or letter. When introducing yourself, your product, or your service to a new organization or to a new individnal within the organization, most people still expect a formal letter, proposal, or other literature to arrive in hard copy,to be read at their leisure.In otherwords, ifyou're writing to the CEO,he or she will generally consider an e-mail a breach of etiquette as a first-time communication from an outsider.

Protocol aside, consider the look. Prefer to prepare a formal report or letter if the content requires editing and formatting capabilities not available on your e-mail software or that of the reader's.
Finally, consider the formality or informality: Because e-mail is commonly used for routine day-to-day business, the recipient doesn't attach asmuchimportance to an e-mailmessage as to a formal report, letter, or proposal.
Reference: Will the recipient need to find your information three years from now? With most sofrware programs, you can easily delete all e-mail older than a preset date with a few keystrokes-or routinely during the archiving process. Although e-mails can be kept indefinitely, most users don't bother to make an exception with their file command on a document-by-document basis.
Speed: Yes, you can send a report across town or cross-country by courier in a few hours. But e-mail takes mere seconds. (Of course, when the e-mail may get read is an altogether different matter.)
Distribution: Yes, you can make 50 copies of a 20-page report and distribute it around the building or fax it cross-country. But that's definitely more expensive and more trouble than hitting a few keys. Second, consider the ease of a recipient forwarding your information to others. That's easier done (with you controlling the quality ofthe "reprint") by email.
Impact, reference, speed, distribution. Consider each in making your decision about which medium to use e-mail for a specific message.

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