Bob Williams

Email signatures. Keep it simple.

April 16th, 2012 | 2 comments | Tags: , ,

How do you construct your email signature? Is it a personal creation or a variation of a template you found? With the volume of emails sent each day and importance of email for business communication the email signature is definitely an important mark in our digital lives. You might be surprised to know there is even a Wikipedia entry on email signature blocks.

Kate Neville of Smashing Magazine gives a good interpretation of the art and science of email signatures.  The foundational advice in her post is to be concise with the email signature. Keep it simple and stick to main purpose.

I see three areas of focus with email …Continue reading >>

Bob Williams

Using online banking to beat phishing

August 13th, 2011 | Leave a comment | Tags: , ,

Phishing and spear phishing attacks do more than increase fraud. The fall-out of criminals impersonating sites that don’t belong to them to trick people into giving their personal information goes beyond fraud and identify theft statistics. Similar to terrorist attacks, it changes the processes and procedures that law abiding citizens go through to transact normal business. Basically, it changes our daily routines because the average Joe has to go through and think about extra stuff to be security conscious. One example is that consumer advocates and the media coach consumers not to open emails that ask for personal information or to update their account.

So how do you deliver messages …Continue reading >>

Bob Williams

When email holds you back

January 23rd, 2009 | One comment | Tags: , , ,

I often hear people talk about how they are overwhelmed with email. They end up not responding to email or responding after the subject matter is no longer relevant for decision making or valuable input. It probably doesn’t surprise people that know me, but I try to abide by the 24 rule for email. I either respond, delete, acknowledge, or file a new email within 24 hours. I do not use my in-box as one big folder where email is sorted by name. Instead, the email in my in-box is sorted by date and generally kept to a page or less on the viewing screen.

Today I was thinking …Continue reading >>