Sunday, 14 September 2008, 7:12 am
It has been an exciting few weeks for me with many things going on. But before I jump into all those other things, I wanted to share the results from my survey that you probably participated in. The survey was to find out which email address appeared more professional or easier to understand with the goal to determine which email address I should use going forward.
A few weeks went by and literally dozens of people participated and shared their thoughts, comments and opinions which were very insightful. I prepared a few graphs below so you can see how close of a race it was for some of the candidates. There are three graphs which are show a percentile of each question.
Question Number 1: Which email address appears most professional?
As you can see many people thought that the utah.edu address was very professional and important when working with recruiters and potential employers. However, many people also thought that the farookkhan.com was also pretty professional, which won by actually just a few votes.
Question Number 2: Which email address appears easier to understand?
The second question was pretty interesting because I don’t think I shared the full explanation or purpose of this question. With my gmail.com account, I was always trying to explain over the phone or in person that it is “farook” with an “i”, “u”, and “m” at the end. It was difficult to get this clear. After experimenting with the different options I had, all the addresses would be difficult to some degree because of the nature of my name. Most people have never heard of “farook,” much less know how to spell it and and my last name often ends up looking like “con” or “kahn.” On a side note, the most interesting rendition of my first name looks like “farhook”.
Question Number 3: Which email address would you recommend?
The third questions was really what I wanted to know because it was a combination of what was professional, easier to understand and what email address would be best suited going forward. The results from this one were really interesting also. However, there was a clear winner when it came to the overall recommendation and that was for farookkhan.com address.
So, after contemplating, calculating and reviewing the data I have decided to go with farook@farookkhan.com as my new email address.
The results hopefully you can see how close and pretty interesting the results are from this survey. I am really glad that so many people participated and that the results were really compelling for either side. An email address that showed up several times under the other category that I would like to give honorable mention to is farook.khan (at) gmail (dot) com. Many people commented that they would prefer to see a farook.khan combination at some domain.
There are some other things that you probably didn’t know about my new decision. My farookkhan.com email account is actually a gmail account; however, I have it through Google Apps for Your Domain. After selecting my new address I started transferring dozens of accounts and subscriptions to my new address. I also was able to copy every single email that I have ever received* over to my new account. It took about three weeks to accomplish the whole goal, especially when you think about the fourteen thousand emails I had to bring over. Having everything on gmail is really nice because it is completely searchable and also “backed-up.” I’ll follow up one day with my extensive back-up system.
Thanks for participating and I’ll send an update on how school at the University of Utah is and my promotion at work and just life in general in the next few days, hopefully.
Farook Khan
farook@farookkhan.com
www.khanfire.com/blog