Improvability Blog

I’ve just spent far too long searching an entire website trying to find out where a particular professional is based in the country.

I’d heard about a seminar that this professional was staging so I was intrigued to find out more including where and when.

And what do I find?

The professional’s website contact page gives only a mobile telephone number and an email address, neither of which gives me a flippin’ clue as to where she is!

How on earth am I supposed to be able to make a decision about whether to even bother telephoning?  If it turns out she lives in Timbuctoo* and it’s going to take me 53 years to travel there, then clearly I will have wasted everyone’s time.  Life is far too short to waste time on people who can’t be bothered to inform me about the important stuff up front.

How does YOUR website stack up?

And please don’t think that your landline telephone number is sufficient either.  YOU may know your local dialling code but I don’t have all the dialling codes in the country committed to memory.  Does anyone?

I absolutely agree that giving away your full postal address on the internet isn’t always the wisest thing to do, especially if you’re female, working on your own, or in your premises on your own for major periods of time.

But what’s wrong with mentioning the town you’re based in? And if you think that even that’s too much information, at least give me the county or state, or mention the nearest motorway junction or railway station - just some clue as to where on the planet you are would be rather helpful.

Just think - you might even get some more customers!

* ‘Timbuctoo’ is a series of 25 children’s books about a fictitious place where various creatures lived, each of whom is named after the sound they make, i.e. Woof the dog, Meow the cat, Cluck the hen.  They were created by Roger Hargreaves, who is also responsible for creating the characters in the ‘Mr. Men’ series of books for children.

Timbucktoo, Timbuktoo, however you may have spelt it before, really does exist.  It is a city - and spelt Timbuktu - in the region of Tombouctou in the country of Mali in West Africa.

Have you heard of email psychology?

I came across this term recently after reading about studies done in the US and UK. Studies showed that 57% of surveyed adults admitted feeling some concerns about how their own level of intelligence would be perceived when writing emails. 

A large number of people also admit to adapting the language and style of their emails to create their own ‘email image’.

This doesn’t come as a surprise when you consider that over 58% of those surveyed also admitted to making judgments about an email sender’s personality, intelligence, and social status.

What I did find surprising though was some of the other assumptions and judgments that email respondents admitted to:

• 33% of respondents try to guess someone’s age based only on the language, tone, and style that the person uses in their emails
• 28% try to guess the sender’s status as authority figure (or not) among his or her peers
• 23% judge how successful the sender might be in their lifetime
• 20% interpret the sender’s social status
• 11% of respondents will make a judgment about the sender’s sexual attractiveness
• 8% gauge the sender’s fashion sense

So next time you are sending an email, ask yourself what else your email is saying about you!

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Business Marketing
Communicating with clients and business contacts
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Updated today with an article written by top London hair image consultant, Scott Cornwall, which offers some sound advice about that first, initial contact with your client.  It’s called:

‘The freelance consultant - who’s manning reception?’

This is one of our ‘try us for free’ products and already has 4 other articles about communicating with your clients and business contacts, so feel free (sorry about that!) to download this latest article and the original four - with our compliments.