Eric Rice is sick of Email. I almost agree that “Email is useless”

Posted on December 14th, 2006 in: Social Media, Web Tools

Eric Rice is getting rid of his public email and will have a whitelist only email, he’s tired of all the noise, and I totally understand. I’m slowly shifting a great deal of my communications to tools that I can speak to the greatest audience in the shortest period of time, my blog being one of them. Anytime I find myself repeating myself it makes blog fodder.

Jeremiah, how do you blog so much?…I respond
A lot of people ask me how I find the time to blog so much. My response is: “how do you find the time to deal with all those emails?” It’s about being efficient and using the tools that can get the most done. Blogging is the most efficient way for me to reach out to others, market myself and my company, and to learn and solve problems with the community providing real time feedback.

The right tools for the right job
At Podtech we use basecamp for our intranet, it works ok for projects, but I’d love other tools as we grow. While I’ve just recently started I’ve built a few ikis (they call whiteboards) documenting my thoughts, plans, and observations. I even have a whiteboard setup as my weekly status report, I just update it as I go along. Anyone is welcome to view it, edit it, or ask questions directly on it. Management can quickly see what I’ve done over the week with a quick glance. In regards to IM, I may have to start using that again now that I’m getting back into the grove of things.

Let’s take a look at communication needs and some suggested tools.

Community Knowledge: Collaboration tools, Wikis
Small group or one on one communication: Real life, Phone, or IM
Question and Answer: Forums, Blogosphere
Reaching, Marketing, Collective problem solving: Blogs
Finding others ‘like you’: Social Networks, peer review, collective preferences like Stumbleupon
Status Reports, Knowledge Management: Wikis, Blogs
Document Management: Document Management Systems (seems like a ‘duh’ but many companies use email for document management)
Email: Sending messages to a small group of recipients, giving orders, announcements.

The next generation of workers will resist email
I was talking to a CEO recently, how his kids doesn’t prefer to use email, they use Instant Message over a Social Networking site, while the TV is on in the background and the homework on the couch next to them.

Aside from the super confidential plans and personal love notes, the next generation of workers will be using social media tools to communicate. There may be less and less usage of broken email. A while ago I talked about the MySpace generation hitting the workforce.

Is email dead to you?
I’ve worked in companies where emails is used for everything. Documents splinter off to different threads, versioning is a mess, conversations go all over the place.

How about your organization? Does email need an overhaul?

Filed under: Social Media, Web Tools

http://blog.chocolategourmand.com brian

I think your observations on email are more a reflection of your own changing career role and less about email in general. I would think directors and executives at most companies would share these sentiments.

I’ll have my admin call your admin to set up a time we can discuss.
Mario Vellandi

In my previous orgs, (now self-employed), I worked in sales/marketing and had to communicate with a variety of internal depts and third-party sales agents. For my needs, when I started using CRM software…it made the world a difference because it organized my job function outside of the Inbox. The problem with email was that with the various:

1) Message types (inquiry, replies, forwards, CCs, announcements, newsletters, goodwill, other)
2) Parties involved (internal by dept., external, and computer auto-generated)
3) Message content

forced responsibility to continuously monitor the inbox, organize the emails, and remain calm & productive. Email broke because the volume of attention and organizational discipline it demanded of increased. That and our reliance on senders using good Subject Lines, among other factors not in our control.
http://www.web-strategist.com/blog/ jeremiah_owyang

Brian…

Heh, maybe. Or it could just be that I have all the communication tools at my hands that i’ve dreamed of and am taking advantage of.

Don’t forget, I’m a big critic of some of these tools too:

Read my rant on wikis:
http://tinyurl.com/y4djjw
http://blog.chocolategourmand.com brian

I don’t think you can compare IM to email since one is asynchronous.

I agree it will truly take the next generation of workers to spawn social media tools at most companies. Very few conversations are considered public (internally) at many companies, when there is no reason why it should be private. It’s a mindset and by-product of inter-departmental rivalries (for some companies) or other competitive (read: anti-team) actions.

If you have to read more than 100 emails in a day, they truly you are either a person of high importance/visibility or email is being used inappropriately. Email’s strengths are its asynch nature and ease of private conversations. Until the cultural paradigm of un-needed privacy can be overthrown (yes, next generation of workers will do this) I am afraid email may still be used heavily as a moderation queue. Companies need to have a more open internal culture, and I agree that email, hurts this goal.
http://allforyou.wordpress.com Brian

I have started to post in my blog when a client asks a question. Then when the next client asks the same question, I send them the URL.

Our company uses an internal wiki to try to catch knowledge that is repeatedly used. But the switch from asking someone to looking it up on the wiki is a big one.

I use Facebook to talk with friends because I can check it whenever I want, and my friend’s comments will be there. I do check it during the workday when I want a break. I don’t want my friends to email me during the day because it is a distraction. I only want to hear from them when I want to hear from them. And Facebook does that for me.
http://kristasphere.blogspot.com The Kristasphere

Jeremiah…I think for interpersonal communications you may have a point. But what about promotional email you’ve opted in on? Net Saver airfare and so on?

Btw my best friend is a physician and refuses to use IM because they don’t type well. Cracks me up.
http://www.aphotographicimagination.com/ Ron Diorio

I think that email still remains a strong and overused communications tool in busineess because people undertsand and use it as an audit trail and because for many of us it is a more portable, mobile and ubiquitous than a wiki or blog currently are.
Bess

Email is still a useful method to receive sale leads besides call, fax and mail.
http://www.web-strategist.com/blog/ jeremiah_owyang

Aside from Email Newsletters, which opt-in can be very useful, but for those that have not opted in that’s considered spam, and is disruptive.

Take a look at RSS as a delivery technology as an addition to email newsletters.
http://www.marketersstudio.com David Berkowitz

For me, nothing beats email in terms of being able to read content and organize it. 90%+ of the blogs/RSS feeds I read are delivered via email (my own blog included). Pulling content takes too much work; I’m happy to have it delivered to me. Then again, I’m a New Yorker – I expect everything to be delivered to me.
http://rickcooper.typepad.com/thepdapro/2006/12/is_email_useles.html Rick Cooper, The PDA Pro

Email is definitely not useless. In fact, it shows amazing resilience in adapting to new technologies. A business associate asked me last week to syndicate my blog to email because that is how he prefers to read blogs, so I did. I have posted a few more comments on my blog to expand on my perspective.
http://www.web-strategist.com/blog/ jeremiah_owyang

Brian…

Heh, maybe. Or it could just be that I have all the communication tools at my hands that i've dreamed of and am taking advantage of.

Don't forget, I'm a big critic of some of these tools too:

Read my rant on wikis:
http://tinyurl.com/y4djjw