Blog posts tagged communications

Freelancers: get a business landline without a landline

It can be a challenge for freelancers working from home to keep their business and personal lives separate.

The humble telephone number is a great example of this. Many freelancers end up using the same landline for personal and business calls. This can lead to all kinds of awkward situations, like your kids answering when your most important client calls.

The price of a landline

But landlines are expensive, costing as much as £15 a month from BT. Getting a second one installed hardly seems worthwhile, especially if you mostly use your mobile for outgoing calls.

Well, here's a cheaper, more flexible alternative. Skype - the internet telephony and instant messaging service that's now owned by Microsoft - can give you a landline number for a fraction of that cost.

It works really well - I've been using it to take business calls for the last few months.

You need to have a Skype account to buy a number (it's free to sign up). Once you have a number, the Skype app on your computer will 'ring' when someone calls it. You can answer and speak to the caller using a headset connected to your computer.

If you'd prefer to have a separate phone on your desk, you can buy a Skype phone instead.

Other advantages of Skype

Price aside, there are other advantages to this approach too:

• Flexibility. Unlike a normal landline, your number isn't linked to a location. Callers can dial the same number and reach you anywhere. If you're out and about you can automatically divert calls to your mobile or use Skype's mobile apps to stay in touch.
• More choice. Skype lets you choose which area code you want your number to have. This means you can get a London number even if you're based in Leicester, or an Edinburgh code even though you live in Essex.
• Cross borders. You can also get a number for a different country, if you choose - it's a nice way to let international clients call you at local rates. Dialing international numbers through Skype is often cheaper too.

How to get started

If you have a Skype account, it's easy to add a number to your package. Just go to the Skype website and sign in. Then:

1. Scroll to the Manage features heading and click Skype Number.
2. Click Get a Skype Number
3. Click the country for your Skype number
4. Click the dropdown menu to choose your area code
5. Skype wlll give you a list of numbers to choose from. Choose the one you want and click Continue.
6. Choose whether you want to buy for 1, 3 or 12 months.
7. Enter your payment details and follow the instructions to complete your purchase.

That's it. Now when you're signed in to Skype, people will be able to call you on your landline number. And they'll never know that you're not using a normal telephone.

• Lower your phone bill with VoIP
• Types of telephone number
• Choosing your telephone system supplier

(Image: Flickr user dno1967b.)

Seven email fundamentals we all forget sometimes

Ding! You've got mail. Chances are you’ve been sending and receiving email for years. And that means the chances are also high that you’ve fallen into a routine when it comes to composing a new message.

We all make email mistakes sometimes, so here’s a quick refresher of seven email fundamentals. Follow them and you’ll send polite, effective emails – every time.

1. Start and finish courteously. Always open with a friendly greeting and end with an appropriate signoff. They make emails more personal and – particularly if you’re asking someone to do something for you – less demanding. Always double check you’ve spelt the recipient’s name correctly.
2. Get to the point. Nobody wants to read an email essay or wade through 500 words to find the ten that matter. Keeping your messages short and sweet shows you have respect for the recipient’s time.
3. Pause for a moment before sending. There’s no undo option for emails and no way to shred them. So always think carefully before sending a sensitive, confrontational or emotional email, particularly if it’s going to several people. (Setting up your email system to delay emails for a minute or two helps eliminate any ‘I shouldn’t have sent that’ moments.
4. Check your email carefully. When you’re in a hurry it’s easy to type the email and hit send. Wait! Use the spell check, read it through and make sure it all makes sense. If you’re broaching a tricky subject, as a co-worker to read what you’ve written.
5. Limit acronyms and emoticons. Does the smiley face really have a place in the workplace? The answer probably depends on the nature of your company, but try and resist the temptation to pepper your messages with them. The same goes for common internet-acronyms like LOL.
6. STOP SHOUTING! Whoops, sorry about that. Nothing screams impolite and abrasive like an email written all in uppercase. Use proper punctuation and capital letters where appropriate. But don’t write anything all in uppercase.
7. Avoid using ‘reply all’. This feature sends a reply to everyone who the original email was sent to. It’s useful occasionally, but most people use it because it means they don’t have to think about who should actually receive their email. It clogs up people’s inboxes with irrelevant messages, contributing to an email overload nightmare.

Have you ever made any embarrassing email mistakes (we’ve all done it once or twice!). What are your tips to stay on the right side of email etiquette? Leave a comment to let us know.

• When it comes to email replies, is faster better?
• Ten ways to use email effectively
• Email blunders you don’t want to make

This post was written by Roxanne McCann and edited by John McGarvey

Email is dead: long live instant messaging

When I tell people that email won’t be around in five years’ time, they look at me like I’m mad. It’s true though – email hasn’t changed for 20 years, and we all know what happens to technology that doesn’t change. It dies.

Email is as secret as Twitter

At a presentation I did recently, I told people email wasn’t secure. To illustrate this point, I explained that information sent by email is as open as your Twitter stream, as long as you know where to look for it.

Some members of the audience looked at me in shock, admitting to sending all sorts of sensitive data via good old Microsoft Outlook.

I went on to explain that instant messaging is the future for corporate communications. I don’t care if you don’t believe me. It’s true and now I’ll explain why.

Twenty years ago people did business over the phone. When you needed something from someone, you picked the phone up or went to their desk, had a conversation and got what you needed.

Email changed all that. We became accustomed to sending a request for information, waiting for a reply, replying to the reply, waiting for another reply … and so on. A conversation that could have taken a few minutes turns into a four-hour email trail.

The only positive aspect is that email gives us an audit trail. I’m not sure about you but to me that feels like a backwards step. Of course, we didn’t see it like that at the time. 

Real-time communication is changing

Well, the world of real time communication is changing and instant messaging is the new black, if you’ll excuse the cliché. Now when I want to discuss a subject I can go into my copy of Outlook and click ‘reply with IM’:

This instantly opens a text, voice or even video conversation with recipient. You can discuss the subject and get an outcome - and best of all the entire chat is recorded in Outlook so you can check what you actually said. You can even share data directly from Microsoft Word or Excel using the share button in the review tab.

Of course, these functions aren’t only available in Microsoft Outlook. There are plenty of other services that do similar things, including free ones like Skype. So, next time you’re tempted to hit ‘reply all’, why not try instant messaging instead?

• Five email blunders you really don’t want to make
• Ten ways to use email effectively
• Five free conferencing tools

Lee Wrall is founder and MD of Everything Tech, an IT support and service provider based in Manchester.

Now is the time to clean up your inbox

According to research, 2.8 million emails per second were sent in 2010. Given that incredible figure (I wonder who counted them all), it’s no surprise that email overload is an ever-growing problem.

You probably know the feeling. You start work in the morning by opening your email. It takes an hour – or more – to deal with all the queries in your inbox. And then you seem to spend most of the rest of the day replying to replies to the email you sent first thing. Confusing, isn’t it?

Your inbox is a source of stress

My own data indicates that almost half of us in the UK receive 50 – 70 emails a day. Some people receive 180 or even more! For all the noise about social media becoming the communications channel of choice, the numbers show that business email isn’t going anywhere anytime soon.

Yet most of us need less than half of the email we receive. Just think of all the pointless one-line replies, the emails you were copied in on out of politeness and, of course, the newsletters, the special offers, the junk, the spam you have no intention of reading but which still takes time and effort to sort through and delete.

Email overload takes up people’s time and causes stress. But there’s another reason businesses need to address this problem: money.

The bottom line to email overload

On average, we each lose an hour a day because of ineffective email use. At an hourly cost of £20, that’s about £4,200 of lost productivity for every single person a year. Does your business really need that in the current economic climate?

Many companies are waking up to this. Volkswagen has taken an extreme route, deciding that the best way to give its people some respite is to block out-of-hours email altogether. Fine, but doesn’t that just move the problem to the next morning rather than solving it completely?

You can do a lot with better planning. Cut down on the number of unnecessary emails you send and be realistic about replying. Take a stand against the culture of replying instantly to everything and instead develop a system to help you identify which emails are important, which can wait, and which should go straight in the bin.

Clean out your inbox next week

Together, we can put an end to email overload. And the work starts right there, in the folder marked ‘inbox’. If you’re willing to give it a go, I can help: my company, Mesmo, is running Clean Out Your Inbox Week – and it starts today!

Together with fellow email expert Marsha Egan I’ll be offering hints, tips and online tools to help you get on top of your email. We’ll explain how to get rid of email noise, what to do to prioritise emails and why email etiquette matters.

It’s completely free and you might even get the chance to win a prize! To get more information and take part, head over to my blog.

• Five email blunders to avoid
• Streamline your email to save time
• Ten ways to use email effectively

Monica Seeley is an email and productivity expert who runs Mesmo. Learn more about email overload and email etiquette on her website.