Communicating Persuasively, Email or Face-to-Face? 165
Jeremy Dean writes "Our intuitive understanding is that face-to-face communication is the most persuasive. In reality, of course, it's not always possible to meet in person, so email wins out. How, then, do people react to persuasion attempts over email? Persuasion research has uncovered fascinating effects: that men seem more responsive to email because it bypasses their competitive tendencies (Guadagno & Cialdini, 2002). Women, however, may respond better in face-to-face encounters because they are more 'relationship-minded'. But is this finding just a gender stereotype?"
Email has failed (Score:5, Insightful)
ask the Airline industry, we invent all these ways to communicate over vast distances, VOIP, Telephone, IM, Email etc etc and people are flying to meet each other more than ever
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Re:Email has failed (Score:5, Interesting)
Speak for yourself buddy. Email and IM are enormous boons to keeping in contact and making friends who share common interests across the world, what is slashdot if not a giant email discussion list in the form of a bulletin board?
The real problem I believe is that email isn't personal enough and good videocamera's integrated into computers for "email" the next big thing is vloging or "vlogging" if someone finally made a workable video phone with optional image broadcast with a decent display and ratio adjuster, that just worked everywhere. It would sell, believe you me.
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Try a Mac with Skype. Both the iMac and the Macbooks have built-in video cameras. I flew with my Macbook Pro to Europe, pluged it into an Ethernet jack, and had a perfect Skype video conversation with loved ones living in the US.
At this point, the obstacle to video calls isn't hardware. It's that networking doesn't work very we
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However, perhaps we should be looking at these other problem... Persuasion.
Personally, I'll have none of it and I don't understand businesses that get talked into deals with cold call sales vendors. (Cold call in the industry means they call you first rather than the customer calling the sales department)
First of all, if you are running a business you should not have to persuade y
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I agree that I would rather work in a company where no persuasion had to occur - where the self-evident value of the goods and services we sold was enough to establish a consumer base and a revenue stream. However, if you're pioneering anything, you're going to need to do some persuading, trust me.
Back around when the dot com bubble burst, nobody knew what SSL VPN was. There was no market. Then, a few companies figured out that it would be valuable for Sammy in Sales to be able to access internal company
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what you've described is basically bribery or coercion. sure, those happen, and are much more prevalent in some industries than others. i've worked in environments where "Sales" consisted mostly of explaining the benefits of your product, helping whoever you're talking to understand them, why it's a better choice than your competitors' products, and why they should trust y
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Re:Email has failed (Score:5, Insightful)
Management by decree is a great way to ensure that you lose good talent. If you are having trouble getting them to comply, it is possible that there's a problem with the employee. But it's more likely that they need to be brought "on board" -- full participation. That is what the persuasion is for. All the staff at my company already have their hands full. If management needs someone to do something additional, then the employees must be persuaded that the new project is more important than the work they have pending. Or they need to be peruaded to work some additional hours.
As for work that "isn't actually their job in the first place," that's a valid argument only in companies with well-defined roles (typically large ones). In small and mid-sized business, many people wear many hats.
Also way off base. A manager is responsible for what goes on in their department; what happens when their boss asks why X was implemented at a cost of $Y? This is one reason why you need to persuade your manager of what is necessary. Another reason they need to be persuaded is that they are balancing a lot more in the decision-making process than you probably realize. They may be privy to information you are not. They may have been given a directive that runs counter to your proposal.
What do you mean by 'bribes'? That's a harsh word for a business lunch, or a couple drinks in the evening. Kickbacks are a problem, but I don't think that's what you're talking about.
You don't do a lot of purchasing, do you? How do you think you get vendors to offer you their absolute best terms? How do you think you build a relationship with a vendor so that when you need a part delivered *right now* they do it with a smile and at no charge? What about when you need to negotiate looser payment terms? Or when a part dies a month after warranty expiration, and you want to get a free replacement anyway?
I used to think that purchasing etc should be a matter of pure numbers, as you seem to think. But as the years have gone by, I've discovered that all those non-quotables really pay off when push comes to shove, and it's the personal relationships that drive them.
The next time you have a complaint about shoddy service (and we all have them) maybe you should think about building a relationship with a supplier so that *you* matter to them?
Yes and no (Score:2)
It's sorta like being funny. Most people think they're hilarious, and that their "cat pooping" video on YouTube, or their "haha, watch me pretend to be a teenage japanese girl" IRC log, is the greatest barrel of laughs in recorded history. Most aren't actually, and their "funny" stuff actually range anywhere from "more boring than watching paint dry" to
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Being persuasive does not exclude being open and fair. If I need someone to do something, more often than not, part of persuading them that it's in their best interests to do so is to be completely open about it.
I think we must have different definitions of what persuading someone is. It doesn't have to be dishonest (I find honesty works best anyway), it doesn'
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The problem is that a lot of other people, especially in large corporations, don't quite share your views. In a lot of cases, even if the boss wanted to be open, the many layers of management usually mean he has no clue either why some decision was taken. And then there are the many which don't want to in the first place. I've had the dubious honour, for example, to work for a whi
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In entry level perhaps, once you get any form of authority or responsibility you will always be persuading higher ups or employees. If your manager comes up with an idea and you disagree, you have to persuade them they are wrong. Just saying "you are wrong, take my word for it" will not suffice. This applies even moreso when dealing with customers. A customer will never just take your w
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People fly more to
- Blow that travel budget, since there is no incentive to ecomomize
- Exchange information, with lower likelihood of that information growing teeth and biting their naughty bits
- Give the extremists something about which to preach
I'm still getting tons of email, some of it of the non-spam variety.Flamewars prove it too (Score:2)
Ya well... (Score:1, Informative)
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Depends on the recipient (Score:4, Insightful)
Perhaps another interesting question applicable... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Perhaps another interesting question applicable (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Perhaps another interesting question applicable (Score:5, Interesting)
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It depends on who you are trying to communicate to.
Like the parent post, I find email or text easier to than face to face communication. So, if you want to sell your idea / product to me, then well written technical documentation will get a much better reception than a talkative salesman. In fact, a sales talk from someone in a suit is the best way to put me off.
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I have run into higher-ups who say, "Take everything you just said and put it into an email for me." They
Re:Perhaps another interesting question applicable (Score:4, Interesting)
Similarly, I used to wonder why people travel to expensive training courses when you can get all the same information from a book - which is usually better organized and from a more authoritative source, anyways. But I've realized, many people simply do not, and will not, sit down and master the information in a book to save their lives. Even successful people. You have to sit them in a room with minimal distractions and engage them face to face.
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or can not. when i was in grade school everyone in a certain grade (3rd, i think) was given a set of tests (WISC tests?). part of these tests were designed to determine how one learned best: written, oral, what kind of repetition was important, and so on. it was very interesting (obviously much more so now that i'm older and can look back at what was going on). myself, i can read den
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Usually it has less to do with learning style and more to do with having an expense account plus not having go to work. Let's see: buy a book and read it on your own time and still maybe have your $42 expense denied, or take three days off from work, get the source, and have free meals? Work tra
fear of being mocked at? (Score:4, Insightful)
I've been researching this issue myself and I concluded that the solution is not to let somebody push you towards a quick answer. Things done/said in haste are usually not well-planned. What email does is that it gives you that ability to take your time and think things over; you can do the same in a real discussion by not replying if you don't have an answer. Tell them that you don't know yet, tell them that you need some extra time, but don't talk out of
Many people know this and use this against us - the trick is to force someone provide a quick answer to a question. The person who answers focuses on providing a fast solution, rather than providing an optimal solution - this is where we lose. I also have to add that those who generate the questions that are 'designed' to knock us down are people who carefully plan their attack. In conversations they can bring up non-essential things that you will waste your CPU cycles on, while they think about their next 'hit'.
Another idea is that you are afraid that the person you're having a conversation with will laugh at you (in the worst case) if you tell them you can't provide an immediate answer. But fear that not, any reasonable human being is understanding and only someone unpolite and ignorant will have something against your taking your time. Personally, I never push people towards making decisions in a rush, I admire those who are not afraid to tell me that they are 'not ready' yet, and I try to avoid those who consciously use this technique as an 'offensive weapon'.
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So. What does one do with such a person?
I have started simply interrupting and saying something along the lines of "which question would you like me to answer?"
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I don't think there is a universal strategy against such folk, but there are some generic steps you can base your strategy on.
If you are a person who does not like to talk much, or fast, always lean towards "I will send you an email in delta minutes, I got a draft and it is almost complete"; or carry a notebook and a pen to make sketches during the conversation while you're getting your message across. Paper and pen are great tools - the bottleneck is in your spee
Re:Perhaps another interesting question applicable (Score:2)
And if someone comes in to see you to talk about something important, just pretend that the phone rang, and you will get back to them later.
Double-edged sword... (Score:2)
"Frat boy & golf games" (Score:2)
Or more accurately, the decisionmakers don't understand the material well enough to use technical discussions as a mechanism for trust-building and/or don't trust their own technical specialists' judgement.
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You need to read TFA.
The point you're making is simply wrong -- the study actually showed no such relationship between technology usage and persuadability via email. On average (according to the studies), persuasion via email works about as well as
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TFA refers to at least two studies.
Experience makes these points clear to me. and You need to read some articles on study practices and statistics.
These two statements make my whole point. Experience is an extremely poor guide to determining what is actually statistically probable. The whole point of scientific research is that common sense and experience are not good ways to reach scientific conclusions. A feather will in fact fall as quickly as a cannon ball wh
Enough PC Bullshit Please (Score:3, Insightful)
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Generalisations made in this manner are rarely helpful. They may turn out to be correct but really do need some scrutiny first.
Re:Enough PC Bullshit Please (Score:4, Insightful)
Well, here's an idea (Score:2)
Well, the problem is that some people put disproportionate effort into presenting prejudice and stereotypes as somehow hard science. The British went to great lengths to "prove" that the Irish are somehow tiny-brained sub-humans, Nazi Germany produced _tons_ of pseudo-science as to why the Aryan race are super-humans and why Jews and Slavs are sub-humans, etc. All the way back to ancieng Greece, you have people who devoted ti
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Amen.
hmmm... another analysis of email... (Score:3, Informative)
Overall they found that communication can more easily degenerate into flames over the internet than into being productive as opposed to face to face communication.
Ultimately each mode of communication has its upside and down side and side effects.
Eh, email sucks (Score:4, Insightful)
At least for my personal life I like face to face because I am forced to be more "genuine" and say what pops into my head.
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Sounds like Obsessive-compulsive personality disorder [wikipedia.org] to me.
(Guadagno & Cialdini, 2002) (Score:1)
you can't persuade using email ..... (Score:2, Interesting)
A lot of the art of persuasion requires the persuader to apply some form of pressure (usually non-physical) onto their intended victim. This makes the victim cave-in to remove the pressure. Email just doesn't have that kind of "presence" (see todays Dilbert) it's just too easy to ignore it.
The best you can do is have an overwhelming reason why your request must be complied with - and to CC the email to your victim's boss.
On the other side, email is a great leveller. Peopl
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Yes, and I believe the appropriate form of communication depends on which kind of "pressure" you're able to apply. Sometimes the pressure is intellectual: a good argument. In this case, the form of communication should just be whichever form helps you make the argument better. Sometimes e-mail lets you think things out better.
You mention CCing the boss of the recipient, a
Er, phone? (Score:3, Informative)
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I dislike calling coworkers. Partly because it requires them to drop what they're doing, which seems a bit rude. Fortunately where I work I can usually just wander over and talk to people.
Anyway, as far as I'm concerned, email is for anything with >1 day deadline, face to face is for anything urgent or unexpected. (i.e. asking for a favour).
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The worse bit was that he was a non-native English speaker and I couldn't fucking understand him on the phone.
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I'm constantly interrupted at the office, which gets in the way of handling my work. I much prefer when people call, as I can let the voicemail take it and address their question(s) when I have time -- I normally set aside an hour or so in the afternoon. Email is even better, since I check it frequently.
As for people w
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Depends on the place I suppose. I've never seen anybody ignore the phone and leave it for voicemail.
I like to think that if it's important enough to interrupt someone, their full attention will be required because I will have an intelligent question :)... if it's not important enough, I will email. Or (better still) work it out on my own.
*shrug*
Face to Face (Score:2, Informative)
I have learned how to write a persuasive email, and I usually follow it up with a phone call as well.
Telephone? (Score:1)
sigh (Score:2)
Yes. This is, to be more specific, just another example of the phenomenon that people will research anything which will press peoples' buttons. Whether it is valuable research or not. Who gives these people grants?
My cat fetches; will someone give me a grant? I want to find out whether he is a dog.
Nothing Ever Happens Over Email. (Score:2)
Nothing Ever Happens Over Email.
There has to be some kind of interactive contact. Phone is okay. Face to face is best. But in my experience and those with whom I work, nothing is ever initiated, negotiated, and settled over email. Trying to do so kills potential projects. Switching over to phone or face-to-face always increases the chance of success.
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I may be dealing with a generation gap in a sense - most of the people I provide services to are a good bit older than I am. But even if they do use
Just try being a telecommuting director some time (Score:5, Interesting)
I send proposal after proposal, request for comment after request, but most of my coworkers -- which are located in the same facility -- see non-customer emails as the lowest priorities, and consider them pretty much ignorable.
My boss (non pointy haired, but not much better) included.
And I'm a pretty persuasive writer (maybe not this message).
But if it doesn't get read, it doesn't get responded to.
So at least once a month, I have to commute to what has become my least favorite airport in the US, just to get a face-to-face decision or committment.
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The real thing is you are probably asking people for things that will cost them and not give back much except to the corporation via your projects. They're busy, so will ignore you if they can.
Re:Just try being a telecommuting director some ti (Score:3, Interesting)
Like I said in a post above, if you find yourself having to persuade management constantly to make decisions in order to do your job, then it is usually a management problem. Usually they have given you responsibility without authority to act on those responsibilities (usually your management has the reverse in those instances... authority without responsibil
Re:Just try being a telecommuting director some ti (Score:2)
Re:Just try being a telecommuting director some ti (Score:2)
most of my coworkers -- which are located in the same facility -- see non-customer emails as the lowest priorities, and consider them pretty much ignorable.
I don't telecommute, but I've experienced the same kind of thing. Especially if the message is trying to convince someone to do something, it's very easy for them just to avoid replying.
I think people also tend to be unwilling to make a final decision via e-mail. They seem to need face time in order to believe that everyone is really on board. I thi
Re:Just try being a telecommuting director some ti (Score:2)
You need to schedule follow up teleconferences to discuss the proposals and get on the phone and call them. You can even setup conferences so that is dials out to the other participants.
If at the teleconference you find out people aren't reading your proposals find out when they can have them reviewed, and schedule another teleconference.
If you continue to suffer the noncooperation, especially from your boss, find another job because you obviously aren't needed where you are.
Re:Just try being a telecommuting director some ti (Score:2)
1.) Working at a foreign branch of a US-based company. Many employees of US companies think that because they work at the "mother ship" they can dictate the way the foreign branch works without the responsibility of making sure the necessary resources and know-how are available to achieve their demands. So you get this "you have to use technology X for your project because we sell technology X", but when you write to ask about some detail of te
One other hint about persuasive email (Score:1)
The person who is reading the email should feel the puckering of your lips from any distance!
Not enough info (Score:2)
* How is "oneness" measured and quantified?
* How is suasion measured and quantified?
* Scatter plot of the two for the different modes (email, face-to-face) for different gender combinations? Perhaps, with statistical measures (e.g., regression figures)?
* Subject selection protocol and any caveats?
Maybe write back when the paper is actually published.
Still one better way (Score:1)
Spam (Score:2, Funny)
Medium has to fit the message! (Score:4, Insightful)
Media have characteristics. Messages have characteristics. It is best they work in harmony.
For a concrete example, I usually avoid communicating a complex controversial idea verbally. It's too confrontational and recepients may miss key points or react too early and get themselves locking into an unnecessarily contrary position. Beter they read and react in private, then calm down before replying.
In person is very good for using body language when sincerity or other emotions are important components of the message. Phone is not quite as good, but often a very workable intermediate.
But I certainly don't consider in-person to be any sort of "gold standard" in communications. Too many different messages.
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Actually I do the opposite. The reason is that people's expressions are the most reliable indicator of whether they understand and/or like what they are hearing. If you talk through a complex issue, it's much easier to see where they are getting hung up. You can then spend more time talking about the parts your audience misunderstands or disagrees with.
Email is too slow for this kind of interaction and phones just don't give you the full
Learned early and from my mother... (Score:3, Interesting)
Learned recently and from my friends... (Score:2)
I'd think (Score:5, Interesting)
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Email is permanent, conversations evaporate (Score:5, Insightful)
For important things, you always have to follow up the conversation with an email just to keep things straight. (unless you're in politics, then you should never use email so you won't get caught in your lies)
As a geek who moved into sales & consultancy (Score:3, Insightful)
Sales pitches and closing a deal is easiest in person. Next on the phone. Almost never via email exclusively - but does happen.
When you're trying to sell something, be it an idea or a product, most of the time the person you're selling the idea or concept to could get something that will work from anyone. What you're selling is confidence that you will be able to deliver, implement, whatever. It's much easier to communicate genuine confidence in skills, product or ability with other cues besides words - be it voice inflection, posture, facial expression, etc.
No rocket science here.
i say (Score:2)
Most Effective: USE ALL CAPS WITH EXCLAMATIONS!!!! (Score:5, Funny)
The hierarchy of effective communication goes something like this:
Best Way to Persuade Someone,,, (Score:2)
Face vs Email (Score:2)
Email, on the other hand, can be used when the other person might think your you have something to hide, "if they saw your face" or if you want to bury some facts deep within a dense bit a email. The converse is also true, if you are not particularly intimidating in person, you might have a better chanc
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you write like this is a cost or risk of face to face communications, but in fact (at least in my experience) it's the biggest benefit. in several ways.
first, note that there are lots and lots of cases where the person you're communicating with will explicitly be trying to gauge your ability to respond to thos
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Your reply implies that everyone communicates well in person... and that is certainly not the case, although I would say I am personally better face to face than through email.
Your reply also implies that the person speaking is trying to communicate accurately and clearly. Some times people are more interested in deceit. I'm sure there are more bad actors than good. I doubt I could look someone i
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hrm. that was certainly not my intent; i explicitly agree with you that this isn't true. but that's an implementation failure, not a design issue. my point was that face to face communication inherently contains the opportunity to demonstrate quick thinking, to be responsive to questions, and to resolve confusion or uncertainty on the
Show us your t... (Score:3, Insightful)
Use Both (Score:3, Insightful)
The ancient Greeks taught their ambitious young men (not women, those were even more sexist times than we're in now) logic and rhetoric. Both were necessary in order to be effective. I learned to be more persuasive and more effective at emotionally engaging with my coworkers and customers because people are not solely motivated by logic when making decisions. Even people who regard themselves as entirely rational. There were far too many times when technically correct decisions were stymied by other concerns that were emotional in origin. It's one thing to know the right thing to do. It's entirely another thing to convince other people that it's right. People are judging you all the time, and part of what they're judging is your conviction, your confidence, your sense of urgency, their impression of your ability to make something happen, and whether you're such a pain in the ass that they don't want to deal with you even if you do get things done. In business (as opposed to peer-reviewed journals) all those things matter, and initiatives fail if the chemistry is wrong. Even in peer-reviewed journals, reviewers are responsive to the reputation of the authors and social interactions influence review outcomes.
So sometimes you need to use irrational means to achieve rational ends. And that's because we are not machines, we're social. We need to engage on more than just the level of logic, even though we're in a business where logical decision-making is necessary.
It's also worth keeping in mind that people work, think and interact differently, so email might work well for one person but face-to-face is the best way to interact with someone else. These simplistic "works for men, not for women" conclusions are too shallow to be actionable.
The principle I follow is to over-communicate, never to rely on a single communication channel when communicating anything important, and to learn what works best for different people.
You CONFIRM in writing after a face to face (Score:2)
In dynamic situations, you look at marginal values (Score:2)
If you are deciding to email somebody or to make a meeting, you don't ask "is it better on average to email or to have a meeting." You ask "at this point am I better off sending an email or having a meeting."
Suppose you've just spent a week locked in a co
The answer? "No". (Score:2)
Communications Nonsense (Score:2)
After a while in college, and several required communications classes, I came to the conclusion that commu
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(I actually kind of agree with you about Communications and I hear that most experimental psychologists would too...)
"However, you know damn good and well that person to person is always the way to have a discussion if you want the maximum impact, as it's a lot harder to ignore someone in person, while it is fairly easy to not pay attention or to sk
Another point of view (Score:2)
Btw - If you're into persuasion you need to read Cialdinis other works. He has some great in
E-mails, chat, and IMs are the best ways for me... (Score:2)
I also face the same problem with people ignoring my e-mails, IMs, chats, etc. I have to follow-up often to remind them.
Are there any other best tips to improve their responses?
Actual emails I receive (Score:3, Funny)
These are actual emails I receive, daily, from the users at a telecom for which I work."Via DHCP or whatever." Thanks.That was the whole email. In its entirety.I swear to you I did not add a single exclamation point to that. Also, if you can tell me how "does not work" and "otherwise works fine" fit together, I'm listening."Pls" turn off your caps lock and learn to spell.This was the response to a salesguy from my company telling the customer that the VoIP phone plugs into a router, not the modem jack on his Mac. I really wish I was making this one up.
You'll notice a pattern to these, as well. Specifically, people who have fairly severe problems, but don't tell anyone for days at a time, then dash off a barely-coherent, OF THE UTMOST IMPORTANCE message into the ether. This is what passes for proper business correspondance these days, and to these people, blithering about a problem days, weeks, or even months after the fact is a perfectly rational way to behave.
These are people who will go on and on about how successful they are with their little mortgage broker jobs or what-have-you. These are men AND women who read and write at the sixth-grade level.
Email fails to communicate -- not because of the medium, but because of the mouth-breathers who use it.
Contradictory, or just arbitrary? (Score:2)
Which is profoundly contradicted by research on flaming:
http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=967562&dl=AC M&coll=&CFID=15151515&CFTOKEN=6184618 [acm.org]
http://www.indiana.edu/~tisj/readers/full-text/15- 3%20guest.html [indiana.edu]
The lack of "media richness" in email makes its intent easier to mistake. Males tend to jump to conclusions because the tend to try to problem-solve everything (especially when the problem is figuring