The art of communicating in an Internet age

I’m a writer, and I over-communicate. I get that.

What I don’t get are people – especially people in the communications business – who don’t communicate.

Here’s an example … I recently sent several email inquiries to a regular business contact and have received no response. There’s been enough of a time difference between the communications that I suspect the person didn’t miss them while out on vacation.

So what’s up? Are they out of the office due to health reasons or a family crisis? I hope there’s nothing going on like that. But, even if that were the case, it seems like there would be an out-of-the-office auto response.

Given today’s modern business culture, who knows? It seems like it’s perfectly acceptable in most workplaces to simply ignore people if there’s not an immediate reason for the person on the receiving end of an email to respond.

This is something I’ve run into in for-profit businesses and in nonprofit economic development organizations.

One of the best lines I heard about communicating was in my Cox Newspaper days. I remember hearing a department manager say that God answers all prayers, even if the answer is “no.”

Seems like if God can take the time to answer all prayers that it’s not too much trouble for business people to respond to an email or text. After all, even if their answer is “no,” how long does it take to type those two letters and press the “send” key?

Then, again, I confess that I over-communicate.

Start writing your post here. You can insert images and videos by clicking on the icons above.