Electronic Media Communication

I saw a presentation by one of my customers from Greece this week, demonstrating how they’d won a big order to supply something to fulfil an Olympics need back in 2004 for Athens.  One of the slides was on dealing with ‘electronic media communication’.  Interestingly, it was thought many people were ‘hiding’ behind such capability.

I saw a 5-point slide along these lines:

1. accept the need to communicate through emails and websites, but do not be lulled into thinking this has the same intimacy as other comms
2. learn the customer’s preferences about means of communications
3. make the communication meaningful
4. impress customers by speed
5. don’t deliver bad news by email

There are sixth and seventh points to add, namely,

• email is merely for confirmation and passing on detail, the phone and face-to-face is the way to progress your ambitions, and
• just ‘cos you sent something, doesn’t mean it’s had any impact, so follow-up via phone etc to progress