Email Discussion Lists

An email discussion list can be a great tool for communicating with employees, a useful but risky tool for communicating with distributors or franchisees, and a downright dangerous way to establish a dialog with customers.

When employees post to a corporate-owned email list using their company email addresses, you know who is posting. There is an unspoken assumption that management has access to the list, and it is best if that assumption is not unspoken, but management is obviously there, communicating with the entire company, possibly issuing regular "from the top" announcements, encouraging discussion of the latest pronouncement, and actively participating in those discussions. This is the modern, white-collar equivalent of the plant manager or company president wandering around the factory floor, talking casually with the workers. It is also an astoundingly inexpensive and effective way to unite employees who work at different locations into a single, coherent team.

Most Net-hip companies already have many email lists, each for a different purpose. Software developers on a particular project can and should have their own list to deal with that project. Salespeople for a particular product line should have their own list where they can exchange sales and product tips and even a bit of general gossip, especially if many of them are far from the main office and work alone and the email list is their primary contact with their peers and managers. Plant managers and maintenance people who work in different cities or countries, but use some of the same equipment, may need and want an email list where they discuss the machinery under their care. The only kind of corporate email list you rarely see is one called "general chatter," and perhaps more companies should have one like this, dedicated to no particular topic, that is nothing but gossip, birthday announcements, personal notes, and even pictures of children and grandchildren. Naturally, you don't want anyone spending excessive time in this sort of non-productive activity, but a little bit of it can enhance cohesiveness and help people remember that they do not work in a vacuum or only as part of a small group, but are part of a large operation full of people who all have their own dreams, motivations, tasks, and personal lives. Bonding is good. Without it, there is no company with a coherent mission, just a lot of isolated individuals or small units, all working without knowing or caring that they are part of a whole.

Monitoring casual email chatter can tell management a great deal about employee morale and can even, if the monitoring is done adroitly, help spot problems that might otherwise go unnoticed. If some of your email lists start getting lots of requests for help from co-workers with a specific piece of software, for example, you have just spotted a need for better training or, perhaps, a bad piece of software that needs to be reworked or replaced with something less cumbersome. But in the meantime, at least people are helping each other learn how to use the software. If it's a new program that everyone is learning, not something hopelessly flawed, the email list becomes a casual, user-to-user support channel that takes a lot of heat off your Information Services staff.

An email list for independent distributors or franchisees is, on the surface, much like one for employees, except that you have less control over what they say. If an employee posts inappropriate material to a company email list, you can discipline that employee, but if a distributor or franchisee feels he or she has a gripe which you do not feel is valid, and posts it to an email list where other distributors or franchisees can see it and perhaps take the complainer's side in the dispute, how will you respond? Just as rumors can spread wildly and uncontrollably on the Internet at large, an open email list populated by people who are supposed to be your business partners and allies can suddenly turn into a rumor mill, or worse, into a virtual mob attacking the parent company.

Okay, you can run a moderated email list, where each post is approved by a company representative before list subscribers can see it. Then you reject a complainer's post. "You are censoring me!" he or she says, followed almost inevitably by the statement, "I have a right to say what I want!"

Yes, you are censoring that user. You really have no defense against that charge. The post you didn't allow to go through may have charged that your company's software product caused harm to wild dogs in Australia or something equally silly, and that may be the reason you censored it, but you are now cast in the role of Bad Person, and suddenly there is a new complaint against you. What do you do now? Allow the posts complaining about censorship to go to all list members? Do that, and you create questions about the original message you refused to post. There is no way you can win this argument short of closing down the entire email list, and if you do that, and the complainer possibly with help from a friend or two digs up the email addresses of his or her fellow distributors or franchisees, you may find yourself faced with a renegade email list that does nothing but criticize you and your company. The net result is stress and anguish. You will wish you had never created an email list for your distributors in the first place.

You probably shouldn't have created an open forum for distributors or franchisees. The safest course is to put out a regular email newsletter for them instead of running an email list. This way, you have complete control over what is published, and that control looks (and is) absolutely legitimate. You can publish selected emailed complaints and questions in the newsletter, along with your responses to them, and answer others privately.

You can't keep disgruntled distributors or franchisees (or disgruntled employees, for that matter) from setting up their own email lists or online forums, but there is no reason you should help them do it.

Every danger associated with open email lists for distributors or franchisees is multiplied for customer email lists. If you have 100,000 customers and a 99% customer satisfaction rate, that means you have 1000 dissatisfied customers. If you set up an open email list for customers and publicize it effectively, at least a few of the upset 1000 will post to it, and it takes only a few people with vitriol in their bellies and time on their hands to make an unmoderated email list useless for everyone else. A moderated list is safer, and a newsletter that publishes only selected customer comments and questions is safer yet.

The only exception to all of this is an email list associated with a news Web site or newsletter that has no vested interest in any particular product or company. A news-oriented email list can do little or no harm to the publisher that sponsors it, and may be simpler and less expensive to set up and operate than comment-posting facilities on a Web site, especially for niche publications that do not have and may not even want large readership numbers.