What media -- social or otherwise -- do you respond to first?

What will you respond to first?
- A call to your home land line
- A call to your business land line
- A call to your mobile phone
- A text to your mobile phone
- An email to your business address
- An email to your personal address
- A Facebook message
- A LinkedIn message from one of your connections, or through one of your connections

I'm betting some of this is age-related and my young twenty-something children would respond first to the texts to their mobile phones, as they know these are from close friends.  Second for them would be their mobile phones.

In my case, it depends on the situation.  Since I spend a lot of time online at work, my business mailbox is the best way to get to me.  I check it much more frequently than my personal mailbox.  My business phone is a great way to reach me, but it is screened.  I personally screen my mobile phone and if I don't know the number, I let it go to voice mail.  I will pay attention to requests from friends via Facebook or LinkedIn.  A message to my home phone is at the mercy of whatever forgetful young person decides to pass on the message -- or not.

I recently did an experiment testing both the strength of my network and the responsiveness factor of various social media and traditional communication channels.   Last week, one of our clients asked us to help them locate some CXO level executive speechwriters and I jumped in to help our team leader who was buried with another project. 

I had three colleagues whom I thought would be good sources of information.  I emailed the first one, a friend and business colleague, as I knew he lives on his business email account and got a response immediately.  For the other two, who are former clients,  I used Facebook to send them my request for information even though I have email addresses for both.  I knew from past experience that the Facebook notification might get their attention faster than an email from me that could fall under a pile of other work-related email.  I was correct and within a few hours, I received a detailed Facebook email response with recommendations and contact information from one and a phone call from the other contact offering an additional suggestion.

Now came the tricky part.  Since I knew I would be a moving target for most of the day, these folks would be trying to return calls and I was going to be out of the office the following Monday, my preference was to connect with people over email. 

I used traditional email with one contact and received the information I needed within a few hours. This is a consultant who clearly pays close attention to her email.

I only had a mobile phone number for a second speechwriter whose background looked excellent for the assignment.  Taking a deep breath (I hate calling people I don't know on their cells phones -- it seems rude, somehow), I called the number and reached the person immediately.  We then exchanged email addresses and within an hour I had what I needed from this person.

The next one on the list was another whose only method of contact was a phone number.  I was getting ready to run to an off-site meeting, so I found him on LinkedIn and sent him the request for information via LinkedIn, using the fact that he is connected to my own LinkedIn connection who had recommended him.  Three days later, I still have not heard from this person so I called his business telephone number and got him immediately.  We exchanged email addresses and now I hope to have everything I need from him shortly in a format I can forward to my internal colleague.  When I asked him if he had received my LinkedIn message, he said he hadn't been in LinkedIn for a few days.  Clearly the LinkedIn notification was not pinging him, as I would have expected. 

The first part of this experiment -- testing the network -- worked brilliantly.  The network is available and alive and I am very grateful to have such a wonderful group of smart people available to me as needed to answer questions like this. 

The second part -- how to connect most efficiently with people you don't already have a relationship with -- taught me that in the crush of communications we all are dealing with daily, it's important to use the right channel to get the quickest response.  It seems like those of us who have agreed to "friend" one another extends the friendship by responding quickly to requests for help.  Being "LinkedIn" clearly is not as powerful an incentive to respond to someone as being "friended," it seems.  Or perhaps that person isn't constantly checking their email, as some of us are, to see the LinkedIn network updates.  The telephone and email work great if you have a responsive person on the other end who keeps up with their messages and doesn't screen out people they don't know.

I was pleased with the power of the network and the ways I could leverage it.  It also made me pause about making sure I keep up my own responsiveness to requests for information over all of the social media and traditional channels, as I don't want the next good assignment to pass me by because someone found me unreachable.