The Pedestal Group

Putting our clients where they belong

Creating Real Email Rules

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Seth Godin put out a blog post today about making an email checklist .  He referenced an article by Chris Anderson trying to accomplish the same. And of course there’s my rant in February on encouraging people to think before they hit “reply all”.  Why are we all writing about this? Because we get too much email right now.  The average person takes 30-60 seconds reading any given email. If you receive just 60 emails, you’ve spent an hour on that just cognitively processing them.  If you have to open and read, that time goes up.  How much time do you suppose you spend reading email? So these gentlemen have tried to come up with a list of rules for email to help streamline the process. For instance, they both recommend using “EOM” (end of message) at the end of subject lines if that’s all […] Continue reading

Facebook and Business Contacts

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Gave a talk in Akron last week that ended with the typical question and answer session.  One of the questions was how to handle inviting business associates to be friends on Facebook.  I will confess – I don’t allow business associates to be friends on Facebook.  That is just for my friends. That isn’t to say some of my business contacts don’t become friends because they do and we are friends on Facebook. But if I met you through a business relationship, I will never initiate being friends on Facebook.  Mostly I do this because I talk about personal stuff on Facebook as do my friends. It isn’t stuff I would “hide” from business associates, but much of it isn’t stuff they would care about. So, for this woman, we all did a little digging. Why do you want to be friends with clients on […] Continue reading

A Tale For Yesterday

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There is an email that goes around roughly once a month about a CEO who decides it is time to pick a successor.  He calls together all his top talent and gives them each a seed. He says, “I want you to plant the seed, water it, and come back here one year from today with what you have grown from the seed I have given you.  I will then judge the plants that you bring, and the one I choose will be the next CEO.” So the executives take home the seed and one guy can’t make it grow. He keeps doing the same thing and gets no result. He goes to the meeting at the end of one year, everyone else has a beautiful plant and he explains he couldn’t grow anything. The CEO picks him to be his successor because he’s the […] Continue reading