Legal Marketing Blog

Whether you are sending an email message from your Blackberry or desktop, don’t be too clever when it comes to business development communications with clients, referral sources or prospects. Leave such for your closest friends and family.

Why? Because it isn’t cute any more (I know, I know – old foggy-speak). And it could send a couple of undesirable messages: 

• you are in a hurry, lazy, too busy, etc. to type a clear message, or
• recipient isn’t important enough for the real thing.

With some people that’s okay, but in most biz – oops, business communications, in my humble opinion (or IMHO), I don’t think it is a good idea.

Well, Frank Reed  over at Marketing Pilgrim agrees with that (and he’s a lot younger than me). In a post yesterday he calls “R U 2 Casual w Your Biz Talk?” he refers to a Wall Street Journal post entitled “Thx for the IView! I Wud ♥ to Work 4 U!! ;)” about job seekers who used this new form of “shorthand” to their detriment. Both posts are definitely worth a read.

I don’t know about you, but after looking over the title of this post and the two others, I’m feeling slightly nauseated. How about you?  If not, let me quote from Frank’s post: “R U nuts?”

I worked at Google from 2002 until a month ago, in the early days I trained new CSRs on handling AdWords customer emails and I was surprised how many of my colleagues were tempted to use smiley faces in their emails. And it wasn't just recent college grads, but seasoned professionals too.