Every posting, message, or email creates an impression, a public persona, from which other people make judgments. We make judgments about others, but how often do we turn that critical analysis on ourselves?
For every opinion, there is an equal and opposite opinion.
An organization’s proprietary, internal information is constrained only by an understanding that stake-holders will keep organizational matters within the organization.
A damaging email forwarded outside the organization is indicative of problems within the organization.
The written word imparts a gravitas the spoken word lacks. The underlying assumption is that time and thought has been expended on what was written, even if that is not the case.
Emails, texts and social media promise the writer the power to be heard…In a society where relinquishing control is viewed as weakness, power is relinquished through every message sent without forethought to the potential consequences.
In the Darwinian environment of business, one’s most provocative words are naturally selected by competitors to be hurled back at them at the most inopportune moments. Do not arm your adversaries.
Neither inherently good nor evil, electronic communication platforms are 100 percent dependent on user input.
A single employee, with one message, can succinctly capture the essence of a corporation the same way an iconic photograph captures a moment. Unfortunately, it is usually the negative massages that are published or used in lawsuits.
An email cannot be ignored. You may wish an email was not sent to you, because you learned what you did not want to know, but it must be acted upon because there is now a permanent record linking you to that information.
Emails are viewed as an essential historical record of an organization. A record that cannot be expunged must be created with care or not created at all.
History was once rewritten by the victors. Now we write our own immutable histories with every email, text, and post.
…with electronic communication, what one writes in a moment, eternity will not erase.
Electronic communication has transmuted conversations into durable and accessible records. Revisionist history has gone the way of the phone booth.