Email and Chat Are Changing, Not Static

Telegraphs, telephones, teletypes, and fax machines all changed the way business was done. All of these technologies have had both good and bad aspects, and all took time to absorb. Fax is still new enough that questions about whether it is proper to send unsolicited faxes are still in the U.S. courts, and what we might call "fax etiquette" is nowhere near as well-developed or universal as the basic style and format of a business letter sent by postal mail.

Email does not yet have any standardized etiquette or set of widely-accepted salutation and signature styles for business or personal use, besides the universally-recognized belief that using excessive capitalization is the online equivalent of shouting AND IS CONSIDERED THE HEIGHT OF RUDENESS BY MOST EMAIL USERS!!!

Chat is still free-form, based on "Hey dude! Whazzup?" informal one-line or two-line conversational snippets, often with many words and phrases (such as IMHO, "in my humble opinion," or BTW, "by the way") abbreviated.

Postal mail started in the days when only a small percentage of the population could read or write and was used for centuries with absolute formality, with most recipients addressed by their titles even in the most casual communications. Email's roots are in the informal world of t-shirt-wearing programmers who called each other by first names even if they had PhDs, and they often didn't bother with a salutation at all since the automated "sent by" and "recipient" headers in email contained all the information they needed to identify each other. Instant messaging and live chat have been driven by an even more informal culture: teenagers talking to other teenagers. In teenage chat, complete sentences are often rare, and "gr8" can mean "great," so that many chat conversations take place in code almost impossible for outsiders (like parents and other adults) to understand.

For businesses dealing with customers, a bit more formality is probably in order. Some businesses that sell heavily to teenagers and want to seem like they're up with (or down with) the latest trends are trying to use "hip" email and chat argot in their newsletters and on their Web sites, but this tactic ends up making them look as silly as a middle-aged man with a potbelly wearing clothes better-suited for 19-year-olds. You, hopefully, are smart enough to avoid doing this sort of thing unless you are 19, communicating one-on-one with a customer via live chat, and you sprinkle your chat interchanges with teen-style symbols as a matter of course both at work and at home. And even in this case, you may want to come across as just a bit more dignified than the average teenager, so you're probably better off sticking to standard spelling and grammar.

It is easy to think that just because email and chat are cheap and easy to use, you don't need to put any thought into the messages you use them to send. This is not true. To a customer, that email you dashed off in a few seconds is you and your company. Spelling counts. A courteous mode of address is always in order, even if it's just a simple "Dear Dan," and nothing more than that, on friend-to-friend emails, and "Dear Mr. Daniels" when corresponding with a stranger. A signature is important, even if it's just a little "Bill" separated from the email's main body by a single blank line and, naturally, you should sign email to strangers with your full name and title, not just your first name; the first-name-only signature must be reserved strictly for email to people who already know who you are.

Email subject headers are also important. We need to start paying more attention to them, in order to make them more accurately reflect the contents of our actual messages than we did in the past. Part of this necessity has been pushed upon us by spammers who use "Hey!" and other folksy, seemingly familiar subject lines to make us think we're getting a message from a friend instead of an unwanted pitch for life insurance or a porn Web site.

In the absence of defined email and chat styles, your best bet is to do the same as you should do with technology: Stay behind the leading-edge curve instead of trying to keep up with it. Let others be pioneers and try new things while you plod happily behind them, imitating their successes and trying to avoid their failures.