Reach Out And Touch Someone- But How?

If you were alive when there was a Bell System, you already have the theme music associated with the title above playing in your head. (If you weren’t, well, sorry – go to YouTube and watch one of the many commercials of the day.)

I want to say those were simpler times, but I’m sure that has more to do with how much simpler my life was then as opposed to now. The rules for communicating were in-fact, however, much simpler. Our managers would tell us, ‘Don’t write a memo if you can call someone.  Don’t call someone if you can go see them to speak in person.’ Those were pretty straightforward times – there weren’t that many options.

A Communications Explosion

Communication options have exploded since those days. We added email…then instant messages…then text/SMS/MMS messages…then every social platform seemingly added their own messaging option.

At the time all these options were growing, the rules and social strata were changing. What is the difference between a colleague, a client and a personal friend? In some cases, a lot, in others, not very much at all.

We now communicate with everyone and anyone across such a vast array of channels that knowing which ones to use in any case can be daunting. And, for those of us of a certain age, remembering where a conversation took place so we can find it again can be even more daunting.

We’ve been extolling the virtues of Unified Communications for over two decades now, but we’ve done precious little actually unifying them across multiple platforms. Maybe we should have called it Expanding Communications instead.

Looking At My Own Tools

When I list and classify all my own channels of one-on-one communications, I’m impressed that I can even remember them all:

Text based channels I use:

1. SMS / MMS
2.  iMessage
3. Facebook Messenger
4.  MS Teams
5. Linkedin Messages
6. Webex Teams
7. Zoom Chat (which still doesn’t work on airplane WiFi for some reason)
8. Google Chat
9. WhatsApp
10. Twitter DMs
11. Instagram
12.  Eight different (active) email addresses

Voice based channels I use:

1. Landline Phone
2.  Mobile Phone
3.  IP Desk Phone (that my last employer forgot to turn off…go ahead now, it’s OK)
4. WhatsApp

Video based channels I use:

1. Zoom
2. Webex
3. MS Teams
4. Facetime
5. Facebook Messenger
6. Google Meet

Mind you, as I indicated, those are just the ones I use on a very regular basis. There are lots of others that I might use once in a while, and even more that I don’t use, but other people do.

The New Problems

This explosion of communication channels raises two significant problems. Firstly, as I mentioned earlier, if you’re trying to find a message from a colleague or client, where do you look? This is as real a problem as any productivity killer, and no amount of over-hyped AI has even attempted to solve it. (MS has now proposed that Copilot+ PCs can search everything ever done on them via Recall, but that doesn’t cover messages sent on mobile or smart devices.)

Did Bill send me the event details in an email or was it an instant message? Did he drop it into Facebook between birthday greetings or Teams between group projects? Or was it just a text message? For all the messaging aggregation services that exist today, nothing comes close to fixing this one across personal and professional platforms.

That raises the second problem, the blurring of personal and professional communications. My European colleagues over the years have communicated with me on WhatsApp even though they were supposed to be using company approved (and regulated) messaging. My ‘dings’ on Facebook Messenger could just as easily be from my son traveling in Japan as they could be from an industry colleague.

Then, what do we do when we’re trying to (ahem) reach out and touch someone for the first time? My neighbor asked me who we used for indoor painting (in an email) and I sent her the contact details. She then asked if she should send a text message to him or make a phone call. Heck, I don’t know what the societal protocols are nowadays. I text with him, but I know him. Is texting someone that you don’t know appropriate? Are there times of day when texting is not ok?

My personal mobile number used to be private for me to call and text with family and friends, but now it is my primary number for everything - professional contacts, businesses, heck - I even have to give it to restaurants so they’ll let me know when a table is ready. When did I lose control of this supposedly private channel, and when is it right and wrong to use it?

The Rules?

Is it still ‘don’t send a note (or email) if you can call, and don’t call if you can speak in person’ or does that only make my approach dated? What are the damn rules nowadays, anyway?

And speaking of rules, are they solid like years before, or fluid across age demographics? I tell my adult kids not to send me text messages when there's not an urgent need for a reply, yet I still get paragraphs of text messages from them (which usually hit my mobile device while it’s on the dashboard of a rental car working as my GPS in an unfamiliar city.) They explain that they send these ‘text novellas’ to all their friends without complaint, so why am I giving them a hard time.

When chatting about this to a fellow communications analyst the other day, he completely agreed, but pointed out that we’re the “geniuses that use this stuff for a living” and we’re barely coping. What do average people do?

This was all a lot clearer before we broke-up the Bell System, a decision which has ultimately not made things any better for anyone. It would probably have been easier moving Humpty Dumpty around to meet our needs than having to pick-up the hundreds of pieces that our communications system has shattered into. I have no idea if all the king’s horses and all the king’s men use WhatsApp, Teams, email or just SMS, as it looks like I’ll need to send them an SMS Novella...

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This article was written by David Danto and contains solely his own, personal opinions. David has over four decades of experience providing problem solving leadership and innovation in media and unified communications technologies for various firms in the corporate, broadcasting and academic worlds including AT&T, Bloomberg LP, FNN, Morgan Stanley, NYU, Lehman Brothers and JP Morgan Chase. He is a Principal Analyst at TalkingPointz and also the IMCCA’s Director of Emerging Technology. David can be reached at perspectives@danto.com or DDanto@imcca.org and his full bio and other blogs and articles can be seen at Danto.info. Please reach-out to David if you would like to discuss how he can help your organization solve problems, develop a future-proof collaboration strategy, or if you would like his help developing solid, user-focused go-to-market strategies for your product or service.