Chit Chat

Mike Donoghue is a member of a multinational information technology corporation where he collaborates on the communications guidelines and customer relationship strategies affecting the interactions with internal and external clients. He has analyzed, defined, designed and overseen processes for various engagements including product usability and customer satisfaction, best practice enterprise standardization, relationship/branding structures, and distribution effectiveness and direction. He has also established corporate library solutions to provide frameworks for sales, marketing, training, and support divisions.

  CRM   Knowledge Management   Lessons Learned   Stakeholder Management  

There is a first time for everything--but you can't imagine what thoughts were running through my head many months ago when someone dropped me a message in a chat room that said "AFK". When I saw it I assumed that somehow I had made the individual angry in some way and that they were throwing a profanity shortcut at me. Imagine my surprise when I looked the term up on the Web and found out that I was mistakenly offended by a person who was saying they were simply "away from keyboard".

In addition to chat rooms, e-mail and text messaging use this form of truncated communication for various actions and phrases. Many of these acronyms and abbreviations have become quite creative and humorous, giving readers pause to enjoy what may sometimes be rather dry material (for example, technical instructions that appear in an online support environment), but when used in excess and with the uniformed they instead create distraction and head scratching.

Knowing when to be formal and when to bring a more personal touch to your communiqués also has much to do with when you employ textual shortcuts. When used with a properly educated audience, they also serve as a form of shorthand that helps exchanges occur at a more accelerated rate.

What's so Gr8?
While there are many abbreviations and acronyms that have made it into the mainstream, much more …

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