We should meet our clients where they are – even if it means texting instead of email communications.
As one of Cognito’s longest-tenured employees, I have one of the largest digital footprints. This means when we decided to revisit a few pieces from the archive and update them to mark our brand-new website, I had plenty of articles to choose from.
During our website migration, I was reminded of many, many pieces which had varying levels of analysis and relevance in our current age. But one line stood out:
“For me, 2015 was the year of texting relationships with clients.”
I can’t even remember a popular song from that year, so reading back through the piece felt like a missive from a stranger in places. A stranger who was very concerned with the philosophical ramifications of sending a text.
I was surprised at some hand-wringing over whether communication through non-email channels made sense in a professional world.
Today our entire lives have been collapsed onto our phones. Some people have separate devices for work, but most people I know in communications (who don’t work with sensitive information) have some way of speaking to their colleagues and people outside of their organisation through a text-based message system.
Part of the reason for this is that the Microsoft suite (especially Teams) is subjectively/objectively much worse as a way to send messages. I find chats get lost in Teams and buried inside a complicated interface. There’s still a yawning gap between mobile native platforms such as Instagram and tools like Google Docs that have been ported over to the phone.
WhatsApp makes sense for ad-hoc groups and event-specific discussions. Sometimes when we go to a conference, we’ll create a fixed group of people on site. Time-sensitive and geographically dispersed international teams can coordinate at any time and then have a conversation on a more secure platform. I know our colleagues in Asia do a fair amount of their business on WhatsApp – or WeChat if the company or client lives in Greater China.
I wrote that piece when I lived in New York. Now that I’m based in Europe (well, the United Kingdom, so someplace Europe-adjacent). I’m conscious of the growing ‘right to log off’ movement that’s pushing back about ever-present availability and off-hours work. Some places are contractually prohibited communication at certain times or prevent applications from being installed on professional devices.
I’m torn about whether restricting communications strictly to email and internal chat channels actually will bring greater calm. At the end of the day, if you need to check these channels multiple times, we might as well just send a text.
For people who work with the media, being fully logged is functionally impossible. At least someone on a team needs to be contactable if serious news breaks.
Another line feels pretty prescient:
“That’s not to say everyone is going to be thrilled if their communications consultant starts giving them counsel through emoji and GIFs.”
I’ve long treated emoji the way we were taught about ordering alcohol – make sure the client does it first. A few 🙂or 👏in response to an impressive piece of media coverage, I’ll usually make sure to reciprocate. The shorter the message, the higher the chance it will contain some sort of pictogram.
(As for GIFs, they seem to be very much on the decline. Alex Hern at the Guardian declared them ‘cringe’ nearly 18 months ago, and I don’t think he’s wrong.)
Slack taught us about the importance of the emoji reaction – be it the ✅or 🙌to someone’s proposal or a whether they want 🐔 🐷 or 🥬 sandwiches fo lunch.This has arrived in Microsoft Outlook, where it is now possible to reply to a request with a simple 👍.
The more we do this, the more natural it will become. This is also bolstered by the arrival of the younger parts of Gen Z, who have been communicating this way through SAT prep, group projects in college and grad school applications.
Why does this type of communication feel more relaxed to many of us, even if the underlying work is the same. A general push towards informality is part of it. I find myself thinking it is easier to connect to someone, be they internal or external, through a simple text, rather than a letter-based communication. A colleague suggested that this also might relate to a great proportion of workers look to build deep interpersonal connections and even friendship in the workplace, which explains why they want to communicate they would would people closest to them.
Email increasingly feels like an archaic, overly formal medium – like I’m trying to mimic the prose of Edwardian-era nobility with its complex diction and highfalutin pronouncements.
Consider: “We have determined that the correct course of action at this juncture will be to create a formal response.” vs. “Let’s send the reporter a statement.”
Sometime after my original piece on professional texting, we had an all-company offsite in Ireland. There we were challenged to come up with radical ideas on how we did our business.
My proposal was simple: Everyone works on Slack. All day. All the time. And to enforce it, I would ban external emails for 30 days.
At the time, this was seen as a step way too far, and lost out to, well… I can’t remember the winning idea. But now, it no longer seems so radical.
Ultimately, only the ideas and the counsel matter; the medium is definitely not the message. I say to my colleagues and people in the industry – as long as your ideas are good, it does not matter the platform and length of how they are communicated.
Jon Schubin is a director in the London office 😆
