Business Etiquette
of the Internet changes the meeting to something less personal. According to Media Matrix, as recently as 1996, education sites dominated the top 15 list of most visited sites. The top 15 that year included no e-commerce sites. Today, nearly all of the top web-site destinations offer content, communications, community, and commerce. The growing of e-commerce should cause all businesses to make sure that their etiquette is in line with rules of netiquette. The basic rule of netiquette is to show consideration for the other party, to remember they are human. When communicating electronically, all you see is a computer screen. You don’t have the opportunity to use facial expressions, gestures, and the tone of your voice to communicate your meaning: words are all that you have. It is easy to forget your correspondent’s meaning and easy to forget that your correspondent is a person with feelings like your own. There are some basic principles that are known as netiquette. One of the first is to identify yourself. Nobody would ever send a letter or a voicemail without identifying themselves. Yet people sometimes forget to include some personal information about themselves, such as a name, phone number, e-mail address, or memorable quote. It is not good netiquette for your respondent to have to ask if you are male or female, if you are an individual or corporation, or if you just use your initials. Not identifying yourself defeats the whole purpose of time saving that the Internet allows the user to have, since the sender will unlikely get a reply with the information they want the first time. In line with proper netiquette is the use of capital letters. A person should never type in all capital letters. This is considered shouting or screaming online. This should be reserved for words you may want to emphasis or stress. It is physically harder for the human eye to have to read all capital letter messages and simply poor form. Considering that nobody ever wrote a normal letter entirely in capital letters, users should not do this to their e-mail messages either. Also it is important to remember not to format your e-mails by using assorted colors and excessive bolding. Businesses with older e-mail clients may not be able to read your e-mails and some people just don’t appreciate them. One of the biggest ways people neglect the principles of netiquette is in just not paying attention. You should read all outgoing e-mail carefully, checking for errors in both grammar and spelling. It is common courtesy to go back and make a check on your work. Most computer programs have a spell check and it takes only a moment to catch all the little spelling mistakes. If you are trying to impress a prospect or new client, nothing will damage your message more that a message with careless errors. Most people will receive e-mails that you could classify a “rude” in nature. The best advice is to not respond immediately, if at all. [next page]