Email Etiquette

Via our good friend Tom Murphy this piece by Ben Silverman on email etiquette for PR people.

I am consistently amazed at how often some flacks make the most obvious mistakes, from the article:

2. Again, no attachments: What I find absolutely amazing is that people send out emails with gigantic file attachments to unsuspecting recipients. I have broadband at home, but I sometimes find it difficult to get a broadband connection on the road and I can't tell you how many times a stupid email attachment has caused me delay. There is no reason why something in the form of a Word document can't be cut and pasted into the body of an email. If it's something that is graphically intensive, put it on a website and provide link. ....

9. Contact, please: I found at least one hundred emails where people did not put their contact information. I also found some strange occurrences where people did not put an area code for their phone number. ...

16. Format in plain text: Inserting your company logo or using graphics in the body of an email can make the email cumbersome. These images may also not appear properly in some email programs and the email will appear in a way that makes it completely unreadable.

It is disheartening to read columns like that. Our clients pay us to know about things like that so they don't have to.