Why email and texting is so darn ineffective?

"Email and texting has made communication easy, efficient and ineffective"

This blows my mind...

UCLA psychology professor Albert Mehrabian in his research found that what works best in human communication.     

7%    of a message is derived from the words spoken

38%  from the voice intonation

55%  from your facial expressions and body language

In other words the majority of communication is not carried by our words alone.

Using those figures from his research, here is the potential for the various forms of communication:

Texting and emails:     7%

Phone call:                45%

Face to face:           100%

Of course this depends on how you present your communications.    Just being face to face doesn't mean you will be able to persuade someone but as you can see it dramatically increases your odds.   

Requests are easy to either ignore or refuse when made by texting or emails.   They are harder to ignore or refuse with a personal phone call and really hard to ignore or refuse when face to face.   Why is that?

1.   The more personal the form of communicaton the  easier it is to read all the forms of communication (words, intonation and body language).

2.   The more personal the request the harder it is to say no.   The more distance from the presenter or requester the less personal it is and  the easier it is to ignore or refuse.  Simple!   And that is why I say...

Let me be clear I am not saying that you should not be professional.   Of course you should.  Your clients expect it and your competitors  are working hard to deliver it as well.   What I am saying is that the more personal your message the higher the likely hood you will get what you want.  

So the lesson here is....move the conversation offline when possible.   By far the best way to get your way is to get face to face because it is much harder to say no when they are looking you in the eye.  And if you can't do that, then the next best is to phone or video conference with your client.