Negotiating via email (or chat)
August 16th, 2004Those that perform live reference these days, might want to read this post on the Online Business Networks Blog. The post discusses an article about how to make e-mail negotiations more successful, but it can easy be correlated to IM:
“The participants who shared personal information about themselves established better rapport and had more successful negotiations. Even simple biographical details (photo, background, education, and personal interests) and some casual social chatter before the negotiations began made it much more likely that negotiations would be successful. Face to face or online, people like to do business with people they know. The researchers also encouraged the participants to use emoticons, symbols used to express emotion via email (for example, ;-) for a wink and :-I for indifference).”
When I was doing online reference, the patrons were mostly teens, whom almost always asked personal questions. While I kept my answers to a minimum, it did help in building rapport with them. Again, while I’m still in the preliminary stages of my social networking reading (The Wisdom of Crowds arrives tommorrow in the mail), there may be a case for building social networks with our patrons to allow for facilitating relationships and trust. I have done this at my firm and it has worked. More lawyers are asking reference questions now than when I started. One of the main reasons is because I have built a social relationship with the lawyers and have become part of their own social networks (not all of them, but some). Thus, they think of me on a more frequent basis for assistance.