Which IM account is most appropriate for business use?

August 13, 2007 2:25 PM

I am considering giving out my instant messenger in my work email signature. The question is "Which IM account is most appropriate for business use?"

The big three IMs are AIM, Yahoo, and MSN. I also run GTalk & Skype, but don't seem to have as much traction as the big three.

Thank you for your advice.

posted by Argyle to computers & internet (20 comments total)

I assume you mean, which service is most appropriate? I would go with whatever most of the people at the office are using. If they're all using AIM, I'd give them my AIM screenname. I'd also advice having a separate business one and a personal one. I don't like office people talking to me on the weekends.
posted by nakedsushi at 2:28 PM on August 13, 2007

I've heard that more business people use MSN, whereas AIM is used more for personal stuff, although that's just anecdotal with no data to back it up.
posted by sharkfu at 2:31 PM on August 13, 2007

I know some large corporations are using the corporate version of AIM, notably Wells Fargo. That means that they do corporation-wide filtering and monitoring, and that users get an IM address that looks like [e-mail]. Google Talk will allow you to set up a similar option for free with their domain tools, so it could look as if you're IMing from your own domain. Alternatively, a lot of companies use Microsoft's SharePoint which seems to integrate with MSN.

I would say that the most appropriate is the one that has gained the most traction with your business contacts and in your company.
posted by mikeh at 2:44 PM on August 13, 2007

Every business contact on my IM contact list uses the AIM protocol.
posted by CRM114 at 2:46 PM on August 13, 2007

My employer has its own Jabber server, so I use that.

I agree with others that having it be separate from your person IM account is key, so you don't open yourself up to being contacted on the weekends/after hours.
posted by dyslexictraveler at 2:49 PM on August 13, 2007

I'm on IM all day, and I don't know anyone on anything besides AIM. I get the occasional Jabber user, but they always have AIM as well.
posted by crickets at 2:51 PM on August 13, 2007

Note that you can register any email address as an AIM screenname (go to Services > Get a Screen Name on aim.com). Why not register your work email?
posted by danb at 3:02 PM on August 13, 2007 [1 favorite has favorites]

I have a universal account on meebo. Then it doesn't matter, I just tell people that my screenname is on "all clients".
posted by unknowncommand at 3:21 PM on August 13, 2007 [2 favorites has favorites]

Frankly, I think we're still at the point where giving out your IM name makes you seem unprofessional. In my experience, IM is only used in two job-related cases:

1. A team of people who work together all the time. You get everyone else's IM name when you join the team, or you have a means of searching for them easily on an intranet site or something. In either case, you don't need to advertise your IM name in your email signature.

2. Someone you communicate with frequently, who uses an IM service while they're at work. In this case, the IM name exchange should be an active decision in the interests of the professional relationship: because email is too latent and frequent phone calls are too distracting. When that decision is made, IM names will be explicitly exchanged and don't need to be in your email signature.

IM is an informal medium, and to give your IM name out thus invites informality. That's fine when the relationship is already well-established, as in the two cases above. And it also means that almost any reputable IM service will do. But if the relationship isn't yet at that point, you don't want to draw a connotation of cute smilies and "u r so funny lol."

This may be flagged as a nonanswer, but I'm hoping it's valid since you said you're "considering" giving out your IM name.
posted by Riki tiki at 3:25 PM on August 13, 2007

To specifically address your question, you should use whichever service is most popular with your colleagues.

However, I completely agree with Riki tiki; it is overly informal for you distribute your IM details to everyone you email.
posted by Count Ziggurat at 3:55 PM on August 13, 2007

Thirding Riki tiki. That said, I have business contacts on AIM, MSN, and Skype. Within the development team of my organization, which is geographically diverse, we prefer Skype. Most of my external contacts are on MSN. All of these are either people within my organization, or external people that I had communicated with via e-mail and/or phone prior to exchanging IMs (for efficiency reasons).
posted by Emanuel at 4:38 PM on August 13, 2007

In terms of whether it's appropriate, I think if you have business contacts at AOL, Yahoo, Google, or Microsoft, you'll find that the culture is quite different and absolutely supports proactively distributing the screenname.

That said, 95% of the professional contacts on my friends list are AIM users. The remainder are Yahoo users. My previous workplace also ran an internal Jabber server for the development team, so I got used to using Trillian to manage all of them.
posted by wildeepdotorg at 5:34 PM on August 13, 2007

my company uses Yahoo.

the main issue is the complete lack of security. Every message you send goes out over the internet and back in. That's why some places run internal systems, as mentioned above.

the other good thing about Yahoo (its the best overall by far imo) is the invisibility that you can set per person or group. so when you want to relax at home, just go "offline" to your work group. and when you want to get some work done, go offline to your friends.
posted by drjimmy11 at 5:58 PM on August 13, 2007

None. IM is unprofessional for most positions.
posted by unixrat at 7:41 PM on August 13, 2007

Seconding meebo.
posted by cmgonzalez at 8:57 PM on August 13, 2007

I have a couple accounts, msn, aol, etc..

I made the mistake once upon a time of giving out my personal account to clients and we suddenly on 24/7.

It's worth making a new account for business use and use a client like Fire or Trillian that lets you have multiple accounts logged in at the same or different times. I can be on for my friends, or work or both depending what I need to do at the time now.
posted by bottlebrushtree at 10:31 PM on August 13, 2007

I think it's ludicrous to describe IM as "unprofessional", but it doesn't seem to be widespread in business. I include AIM, MSN and Skype in my email sig but they're rarely used, even though most of the people I'm dealing with are working in fairly tech-savvy companies.
posted by malevolent at 12:28 AM on August 14, 2007

Thanks for the all the tips and advice.

I, too, feel that IM hasn't reached mainstream business usage yet, but the trends in personal use are changing this.

I like the idea of a work only IM address that only is used during working hours.

My use of a signature may be different than others. I don't use them every email, I insert them manually, when I think the recepient could use the information. I have different versions for internal vs. external use, and plain text & html versions.

Thanks again for taking the time to answer.
posted by Argyle at 6:21 AM on August 14, 2007

I think we're still at the point where giving out your IM name makes you seem unprofessional.

Sorry, Riki tiki, but business are using IM - as in, telling all their employees to make a screen name and add it to the contact list - more and more now. Even the Wall Street Journal has extolled it as a lightweight, flexible means for communicating within and between offices.

Argyle, if you're talking about a regular day job, just ask what others are using. If you're a freelancer, AIM is still very common, but you might want to have a screen name on the other services, too, just in case. Whether you make a work-only screen name is up to you, but if you've been using chickenhawk42, yeah, you'll want a different one for work.

I'm connected to AIM almost 100% of the time, by telephone when not at a computer, and I haven't had any problems with people suddenly expecting that I work 24/7. I have, however, had dozens upon dozens of tiny interactions - exchanges of a few lines of text at a time - that made work considerably more efficient. In my experience, IM in the workplace is as professional the user.
posted by caitlinb at 9:01 AM on August 14, 2007

We have a Jabber server at work too, but it's only used for *internal* communication. The problem with using Jabber for *external* communication is most people we contact aren't familiar with it (yes, I know Google's Gtalk is Jabber based, but that's not the same as having contacts on *our* server), and would sooner rather contact us via one of the "major" IM services (AIM, Yahoo, etc).

That said, you could also have a Jabber server set up that'll "connect" to other services, thus giving you an "all-in-one" um...in/out box for IM's, for lack of a better description.
posted by edjusted at 12:49 PM on August 14, 2007