Effective communication skills for business and personal success

For better or worse, email has revolutionized the nature of business and personal communication around the world. No longer is it necessary to place a long distance phone call, meet face to face, or write a letter to initiate a conversation. With email you simply press a button and your message can be sent to any number of people anywhere in the world.

If it seems like everyone has email, that’s probably because almost everyone does! According to the UCLA Internet report, 72 percent of Americans use the Internet and 88 percent of internet users use email. In business, these percentages are for all practical purposes 100 percent. I knew for sure that email had penetrated the last level of resistance when my eighty-five year old mother-in-law bought a laptop and started using email and IM to communicate with her extended family.

In its most recent report, IDC [i] estimates that there will be 97 billion emails sent in 2010. This is up significantly from the 30 billion emails sent just a few years ago in 2004. While it seems like email has replaced standard postal mail, the US Post Office still delivered 212 billion pieces of mail in 2007, although I suspect that few of these pieces of mail were letters.

Of course, like most things in life, email has the potential to be very beneficial and useful and, at the same time, it has the potential for danger and harm. These web pages are dedicated to helping you maximize the opportunities of email and minimize the dangers.

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Email gone wrong

Brenda O'Rourke

I work for a transportation company that is the dedicated carrier for a corrugating plant, we are located within this plants shipping office. I had a driver call in that he overslept(everyone does in their life time). I looked at the load he was on and was able to move him to a later pull time and re-assign a new driver to make the delivery on time. I sent an email out to our customer (the corrugating) plant and my transportation management...that the assigned driver to the specific load overslept and the load was re-assigned to another driver to make the on-time-delivery. Well, the customer-was happy to know the new driver was going to make this delivery on time however "MY" company MANAGER frowned on it. Stating that I divulged too much info on this, I assume the info regarding the original driver over slept. Since we "SHARE" the same office that the customer's shipping office is in, their shipping personnel knows everything that's happening...and believe me they report it back to the "big guys". I was told by my company: "too much info" re: driver oversleeping, so my company has raised eyebrows towards me. It is definitely very difficult with 2 business's operating in the same close quarters. any suggestions as to how to handle this type of situation in the future?

Posted at 4:12:pm 01/18/12

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The Impact Of Email On Communication