Yesterday I needed advice about selling some of my photographs. I have some pictures that a newspaper is interested in buying, but I have no idea about how much they are worth, and how to go about the sale. I did a little investigating on the internet and was able to find a well written blog by a professional photographer. He deals with this type of stuff all the time, so I decided to contact him to see if he had anything helpful to tell me. On his website there were two channels with which to contact him. One was telephone and the other was e-mail. I decided that for this situation, my best bet would be e-mail, because it was the richest medium for this communication task. In an e-mail I don’t have a certain amount of time to convey my ideas and thoughts, I am able to think about what I want to ask and word my questions in a coherent and intelligent way. Not to say that this isn’t possible over the phone, but I feel that it’s easier to get better answers when I have time to write the questions down, while at the same time giving the recipient more time to think of answers without putting them on the spot. Another reason this medium was right for my task is that I didn’t have 20 minutes to devote to a phone conversation; I was in between classes, and I had about 5 or 10 minutes to sit down and type. The final reason that e-mail was the optimal medium for my task is that I am now able to go back and read the response as many times as I want. If I forget something that the photographer said, I can open the e-mail again to refresh my memory. On the phone I would basically have one shot at getting the advice, because words are usually lost the moment they are spoken. The photographer ended up giving me great advice by writing a thorough and detailed reply that will be very helpful to me.
Another instance of media selection goes back a couple of weeks. I had spoken to a prospective employer about the possibly of getting a job at their place of business. They e-mailed me back saying that there were two positions available, and I could just send my resume to them by e-mail. This however was not how I chose to approach the task. I decided to hand deliver my resume, rather than sending it electronically. I made this choice because I wanted to make face to face contact with the person who was deciding whether or not to hire me. If I solely used e-mail for this task, my communication with the employer would be vague and ambiguous. Speaking with the employer in person allowed me to personalize the experience by giving and receiving cues and making positive impressions that simply cannot be made just through e-mail. I was able to get instant feedback from the employer, and in the end I got the job.
1 comment:
Hey Tyler, I found your post pretty interesting; both your instances of communication had pretty serious consequences—jobs were up in the air, as opposed to minor social impressions. As I learned in a corporate internship this summer, there are so many different ways to communicate within a workplace. Sending an e-mail, making a phone call, and walking to someone’s cubicle all take roughly the same amount of time, but each medium still greatly affects and is affected by impressions. It would have been nice for you to discuss which method of media selection governed (or did not govern) your actions because I tend to think that the Media Richness Theory applied to your situations rather than O’Sullivan’s Impression Management Model. In getting the first job, an e-mail did the very unequivocal task of voicing your intentions and your physical presence in the second example did the rich task of getting yourself noticed by using positive nonverbal cues.
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