Emojinal connections: the power of pictures

In the grand tradition of Mainstream Journalists Misrepresenting Academic Studies, the Telegraph today reported using emojis makes other people think you are incompetent.

It quotes report author Dr Ella Glikson, saying "Our findings provide first-time evidence that - contrary to actual smiles - smileys do not increase perceptions of warmth and actually decrease perceptions of competence."

Digging deeper, however, it seems the headline is misleading. The study, published in Social Psychological and Personality Science and based on a series of experiments involving 549 people from 29 countries, evaluates the use of emoji within work email.

In one test participants were asked to read a work-related e-mail and then evaluate the competence and warmth of the person sending it. The smileys in an e-mail had no effect on the perception of warmth and the participants judged the sender as less competent, the study concluded.

What the study doesn’t make any conclusions about is the impact of emoji on message reception and sentiment on any other medium, or even in email in non-work contexts.

All of us make assumptions about the sender of a message based on both its content and the style of the message - from the choice of words to the tonality, punctuation and even the font.

That being the case, the academic’s advice is broadly sound - if in doubt, don’t be over-familiar or unprofessional until your relationship with the recipient has developed to the point that familiarity is warranted. Just as I wouldn’t start an email to someone I barely know at work with “alright chief!”, nor would I sign one off with an eyeroll emoji, because I’m not a complete idiot.

That sending badly-written mails is a career-limiting move is hardly news, and nor is it a reason to write off what some have called the fastest-growing language in history.

Will Schwalbe and David Shipley, authors of the book Send: Why People Email So Badly and How to Do It Better, noted that, "the biggest problem about all electronic communication is that it's toneless. In the absence of tone, people read negative tone into it.”

Emoji are designed to convey emotion and can help make tone and meaning clearer.

In fact, images can be powerful additions to text-based communications.

We process visuals 60,000 times faster than text. They can instantly inform, intrigue, inspire, delight or capture the imagination of those that engage with them.

In a world where we are faced with an avalanche of information images (including emoji) help us to decode and decide what to read in more depth. In fact, images aid communication in two ways:

Cognitively, they expedite and increase our level of comprehension, recollection and recognition. Visual clues help us to decode information.

But they also work emotionally, enhancing or affecting an emotional response.

That’s why emails with emoji in the subject line are more likely to be read. They’re proven to increase engagement on social media too. According to Social Media Today:

• on Twitter, emoji result in 25.4% more engagement
• on Facebook, emoji result in 57% more likes, 33% more comments, and 33% more shares
• on Instagram, nearly 50% of all comments and captions contain emoji

Tone and emotion are easily sacrificed in short-form messages such as Tweets, Slack messages and Facebook comments. The addition of an emoji can diffuse an otherwise terse message and or help convey sympathy.

They’re taking on a whole new role on enterprise social networks, on platforms like Slack and Workplace by Facebook, where they provide a means by which time-poor senior leaders can participate in the conversation and show empathy through the use of emoji reactions and comments.

So the arrival of emoji has given internet users an armoury to prevent misunderstanding and bring empathy - or sarcasm - into conversations. So while they’re not always appropriate in email, all the evidence points to them enhancing informal short-form communication such as push notifications or live chat.

Here’s my advice on effective emoji use:

1. Know your audience. As this study points out, it’s all about context. While the language of emoji has transcended cultural barriers, you shouldn’t assume all your audience get the meaning. Do some audience research and testing to figure out just who you’re talking to; if they don’t use emoji, nor should you.
2. Test. Iterate. Don’t obfuscate. Some emoji are better understood than others, so stick to those which are either easy to decode (such as “woman shrugging”) or widely used. Test what works and drop those which don’t.
3. Make sure your emoji enhance rather than detract from your meaning. They should make text easier to absorb and generate emotion at a glance - not replace actual words. Using a flag instead of a country name forces the user to do the hard work of figuring out what it means (“Is that Ireland or the Ivory Coast? Who knows!”). Forcing users to squint at their phone to play your game of corporate pictionary is proven to annoy users and reduce engagement.
4. Plan and use for real-time messaging. Emoji are ideally suited to in-the-moment messaging, thanks to their mobile-friendliness and emotional tonality. They can take tension and aggression out of real-time chat,, so plan ahead and build them into your brand voice and message house. Emojipedia can help you find the right combinations for your messaging.

Ignore the headlines - emoji are big and they are clever. Use away and inject some ?? and ?? into your communications.