photo by by MarcinMoga / Lolek

Someone just emailed me and asked me a good question (the answer to which will be in my next post). What was interesting is that they asked me the question in such a way that they were pretty much guaranteed a response. Their email went like this:

– Say nice things about my blog and establish a common ground.
– Ask question.
– Finish up with nice thing.

How could I refuse? This is like the sandwich technique of giving advice during speech evaluations at Toastmasters which goes: praise, criticise constructively, praise. Also it taps into social obligation: the emailer gave me a gift of praise, and now I am obligated to give back by answering their question.

So remember this technique when writing to people to ask them questions. I do it all the time at work:

– You are awesome and so is everything you do.
– Can you help me with this?
– Thanks, you’re awesome.

Then I always follow up with a thanks email when they do it, so they’ll remember I was grateful the next time I ask them for something.

Try it out!

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 22nd, 2010 at 5:41 am and is filed under Musings. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.