Here is one idea: start with email. Not so long ago, you spent plenty of money on designing, printing, and reordering boxes and boxes of company letterhead. Your regular correspondence to customers, vendors, and business partners arrived in the form of an attractive envelope containing an even more attractive letter, on your letterhead, carefully and completely proofed. Especially for new customers, this might be one of the first impressions you made.

Take a look at the last email you sent to a prospect. About half of you sent that important letter on someone else's letterhead. That's right, you dug into a box of letterhead you found in the storeroom left over from the company that rented your office last year. Perfectly good paper, why waste it? Your letterhead said something like "cool_biz_owner@gmail.com".

Idea #1: Get your own domain name and always use it to send emails. Always. Do it today. About a third of you sent that email with one out of ten words spelled wrong, with grammatical errors, or with portions of the message missing entirely. You would have never done this with your letterhead.

Idea #2: Always spell-check and proof-read every email that you send from your domain. If you have more than a few employees and have your own domain already, it is a guarantee that some of your people are using company email for personal use. It is entirely possible that they are shopping online with a competitor using their email address on your company server. And, perhaps, some other things even worse.

Idea #3: Create, publish, and enforce a policy governing use of company email addresses. Make sure everyone understands why.

You have likely used your email system to send a message to a group of people. It may even be something as innocent as a holiday greeting to all of your important customers. There are many ways you could have done this, almost all of them bad. If you simply listed all of the recipients in the "TO" line, you exposed a list of your customers to all of your customers and to anyone else that received a copy of the email. You also risked being branded a SPAM site as large destination lists are one of the markers for SPAM.

Idea #4: Review all email usage within your company by everyone. Determine your usage pattern and the benefits that email delivers to you company. Then consider these ideas, and several others, in order to ensure that you are getting the value you deserve from this useful tool.

Email is one of the many ubiquitous and useful technology tools you have in your toolbox. A tool almost as simple as a hammer, but a tool that must be used with care.

2010-02-17 10:50:45 -0500