Friday, February 19, 2010

How to simply avoid a bad impression

You never get a second chance to give a second first impression. That's why you want your first impression to be impressive.

Yet, many organizations fail in this. Sadly, it is because people fail.

A simple example is a presentation brochure: a company writes to a set of prospects telling them how wonderful they are and why everybody should instantly drop all their current suppliers to take advantage of the awesome partnership they are offering.

What's wrong in this? Actually nothing, as commerce is based on advertising.

But.

If you're trying to tell me how irreplaceable you are, at least try to avoid misspells! How good can a company be, if they don't even take the time to spellcheck their booklets? And booklets are what everybody else is supposed to see! Can I trust a company that does things this carelessly? If this is how they manage communications, how will they deal with all my oh-so-important-megastuff?

The same applies with everyday communications: even if you're only sending a mail as a service desk operator, try to reread it and spellcheck it. It only costs a few seconds and greatly improves your image. Well, maybe I'm too hopeful... maybe spellchecking won't help, but failing to do it could cause a certain harm. You could be labelled as careless, distract, ignorant, and so on and so forth (at least, as far as I'm concerned).

Personally, it also annoys me a little. Don't you think I deserve a little more attention than this?

Unluckily this happens almost everywhere: whenever a colleague of mine sends out such a mail, it annoys me even more, because he's in the same team in which I am, and as a result I automatically become "one of the lazybones of that crappy company". Well, I'm not a lazybone and the company I work for is not crappy, so would you please invest some of the time our company pays you for to avoid embarassing us all?

It only takes some seconds...

BTW, to walk the walk and not only talk the talk, from now on I'll have to double-check everything... or else be prepared to be fired upon ;-)

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