• Understand how email chains and listservs are used for communication
• Compare various instant messaging and texting services
• Explore how multimedia platforms can be used professionally
• Understand how to choose the most suitable communication channel for a specific message

Digital Group Communication

Group Email

An early digital method of professional group communication was through group or mass email chains. One advantage of using email is that the sender can easily add as many recipients as they want. Any replies from the recipient(s) are stored under this original email and allow for interactive comments and replies from all recipients. However, more often you will hear it referred to as an email thread since the phrase “email chain” has a negative connotation because of its association with spam email. Chain emails are a type of email that asks recipients to forward the email to multiple people. These are considered to be a type of spam since they often contain false information, hoaxes, or an attempt to scam the recipient.

Businesses often use email to provide information to customers, such as a sale promotion or recall of defective items. Since email is an affordable way to reach a large customer base, it is tempting to want to send out mass emails. Yet, a mass email approach to sending this type of information can quickly become unruly since there are so many recipients, and all participants are allowed to respond to the original sender or each other. This can lead to threads of responses being embedded within other threads, making it difficult to find specific information easily. Also, mass emails run the risk of violating recipients’ privacy by disclosing all of the recipients’ email addresses if the sender does not use the appropriate BCC, or blind copy, option.

Digital Mailing List

To address these limitations and potential liabilities, companies use mailing list software, also called a listserv. Listserv software was created to help manage larger numbers of users and for commercial purposes. Listservs provide a way to reach thousands of people via email when they subscribe to the listserv. Listserv software also manages the “subscribe/unsubscribe” administration and can allow threaded discussion of the email content among the users on the list. The term listserv has been used to refer to electronic mailing list software applications that allow a sender to send one email to the list, which then transparently sends it to the addresses of the subscribers to the list. 

The Sierra Club

The Sierra Club is a grassroots environmental organization founded in 1892 with over 3.8 million members and supporters today.^[1] It is a nonprofit, member-supported public interest organization that promotes the conservation of the natural environment by influencing public policy decisions.

Interested individuals can easily enter their email on the organization’s website to sign up for a newsletter that arrives by email twice a month. Rather than contacting a human, recipients can conveniently click within the email to unsubscribe if they want to stop receiving the newsletters.

Manually-administered mailing list systems that rely on human administrators cannot keep up with the demands of such large groups. With today’s listserv abilities, management and subscription procedures for mailing lists are simple and flexible, leading to greater opportunities for engagement with interested parties.

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