Global TuneUp™: Your email signature

A good starting point for any Global TuneUp™ is to ask yourself:

What sort of clear and precise contact information would I need or want if I were someone from somewhere else who needs to contact me and knows little or nothing of me, my work, geographical location and/or culture?

I've put together some helpful hints. Note that many of these suggestions apply to both individuals and organizations, institutions and business for use on or with:

• Business cards
• Email signature files
• Web sites
• Social media and social networking sites

• You should always include, at the very least, your first and last names as you commonly use them.
• You may want to indicate a courtesy title that indicates your gender or position (Mr., Ms.), either before or after your name. Remember, your name may not be as gender-specific in other cultures as it may be in your own. For example, "Kari" is a female in Norway and a male in Finland! The recipients of your e-mail may appreciate knowing this information to help them avoid potentially embarrassing mistakes.
• If you use a nickname, consider including it in parentheses as well:
  (Mr.) Christopher ("Chris") Landers
  This may help to prevent confusion, especially when communicating with others who may not be familiar with nickname conventions in your culture.

• Give your complete title. In some cultures, this is considered very important there are those who will want to understand where you "fit" in the hierarchy of your organization.
• Completely spell out your title. For example, don't expect others from outside your culture to understand that "Assoc." means "Associate", "Dir." means "Director" and "VP" means "Vice President". Don't make people guess!

• If the office in which you work has its own name, then spell it out completely. This is especially important in a large organization (such as corporations, colleges and universities and large nonprofits) where knowing the name of your office may help someone find or identify you.

• Be sure to include the correct and complete name of your employer. It may be common to refer to the "U of M" around your office or geographical location. Does the U mean "University" or "Undertakers". Your contacts need to know if the "M" respresents Minnesota, Michigan, Maine, Madagascar, Monrovia or Malaysia. Don't make people guess!
• Don't rely on your URL to clarify things (it almost never does) — or expect your correspondents to check it! After all "USD.edu" could be "University of San Diego", "University of South Dakota" "Universalists of South Dakar" or "University of Stockholm Drottingholm". Don't make people guess!

• Be sure to include your country at the end of your address! If you don't, this could easily be interpreted as a subtle form of arrogance and/or cultural imperialism or (worse) a woeful lack of etiquette. Do you really want to give that impression to others? For example, Palestine exists in the Middle East — and Texas USA. Watford can be found at least twice in the UK, once in Canada and once in North Dakota, USA.
• Avoid abbreviations whenever possible — except for ultra-common ones like UK, UAE, USA, PO Box, etc.
• Completely spell out your town, state/province. Why? It is discourteous to expect people from outside your business/organization, locale and/or region to know the abbreviations of place names or commonly-used words from your institutional or regional "culture". This might also include common abbreviations such as "St" for "Street", "Ave" for "Avenue", "Ste" for "Suite".
• Include your ZIP (USA) or postal code. Don't leave this out! Note for those in the USA: Please find out what your full ZIP+4 code is — and use it! The four additional digits help the US postal service route mail with greater precision , helping to speed important mail your way. Most locations — and even offices within corporations / institutions — have a specific Zip+4 codes. Not including this information is guaranteed to delay your mail because the US Postal Service now re-routes all mail with 5 digit zip codes to special machines to determine and assign the correct ZIP+4 and then send it back to the regular mail stream.
  
• It is helpful to include a building name and room location if this is different than your location's street or post office box address. If you have both, it may be wise to include both.
• In this day and age of social networking and web sites, you may find that you don't feel it's as important to include a postal address. If this is the case, be sure that you provide your correspondents with enough information that they can easily reach you in a variety of ways.

• Be sure to include your country code, preceded with a "+" sign, such as:
  +1.411.555.1212
  This is especially important for professionals in the USA. Most people in countries outside the USA (such as Canada and Jamaica, which are also under the +1 country code) include their country code in their contact information. It's critical information, for example, that Morocco's country code is "+212" and Britain is "+44", etc. However, people in the USA omit "+1" all the time as if the world revolves around us and our country code!!! Imagine what we are communicating to others when we expect people to look up or "know" the country code for the country in which we (not they) live. Is that a message you want to send or an impression you want to give to others? If you use the country code designations, you'll be using standard information that anyone in any country can use around the world, regardless of the way that their phone provider asks them to access international lines.
• Do not include any digits in front of the country code that may be numbers used to access long distances lines/carriers from your country, such as 00, 001, and 011. This is an incredibly common error. These additional digits are access codes to access an international line — and these digits very according to location, phone system, countries, etc. Leave them out.
• If your country uses "0" or other numbers in the digits that indicate and area or city as a way to distinguish dialing a number from inside your country, consider framing these with parentheses to indicate that these are optional, such as: +44.(0)2.411.555.1212. This is yet another good reason for only using "." as a divider for telephone numbers — to allow in-country digits to be easily recognized.
• Spell out words or use common abbreviations such as "Telephone:" or "T:" or "Tlf:" for your main telephone number, "Mobile:" or "M:" for your mobile number and "Fax:" or "F:" for your fax number. These are standard international designations. "Cell phone" is mostly a USA designation and can confuse international contacts.
• If you are set up so that all your phone numbers can be fed into one line, consider doing this. Google Voice and Skype provide some free as well as low-cost services in this area. (I haven't had a landline since 1994 — and haven't missed it.)

Your Email Address

• Be sure that you include your complete email address. This is especially important in email signature files as you never know when your "From" field could become corrupted while traveling through a myriad of email servers and the information in your sig file may be the only clear and readable version the receiver will have. It has happened!

• Did you know that the way in which you write the URL of any website in an email (such as in your signature file) can actually prevent others from accessing that site? I've already written about this in my post "Are you 7 characters short of helping people find your information?". Check it out!