Every encounter, from conferences to meetings to
training sessions to business lunches, presents an opportunity to
meet people, network, and expand your professional contacts by
making a positive first impression. You've got just seven seconds -
but if you handle it well, seven seconds are all you need!
Seven seconds is all you get, that's what Forbes
magazine says anyway.
We may have been like that all the way back to the
cave when frustrated man smacked the object of his desire over the
head with a stick and dragged her off by the hair. I don't know
about that, but I do know about this, it's been seven seconds for a
long, long time.
Mark (not his real name), who is now a respected
business and family man living in California had it all figured
out. When he saw the object of his desire he would walk right up to
her and say: "Hi!
My name is Mark. How do you like me so far?".
Less than seven seconds. You'd be surprised at the results.
I'm beginning to think seven seconds is all we've got
in correspondence too. If I send an email asking three questions
I'll get an answer to the first one, something ridiculously off
base concerning the second, and nothing at all pertaining to the
third. If I email three answers the first will be understood, the
second will be misunderstood, and the recipient will angrily accuse
me of not giving the third.
At first I thought it was me but too many people say
they're getting the same thing. Maybe you've run into it too, I
don't know, but it made me wonder why and I think it's SMS.
SMS, Small Message Services, started out as 128
characters we could send to a pager. Most people only knew you
could send a phone number but you could send text messages as well.
SMS is now 160 characters and is the basis for all
those Tweets and TXTs we live on. Oddly enough it's only 160
because a character named Friedhelm Hillebrand argued
that 160 characters was "sufficient to express most messages
succinctly".
Are we so used to SMS messages that we don't read more
complete messages? It sure seems like the emails I send longer than
160 characters get truncated by the recipient. That would explain
the responses I get anyway.
