Vacation Email Page

Luis Suarez is on week six of giving up on work email.  Not entirely, but constraining its use to the proper while moving other communications to social software.  This week he found the reliability of those other tools made people default back to email.  While he doesn't mention what services went down on him, its an obvious distinction between consumer and enterprise.  Jon Mell builds upon his experiment to explore ROI and I can add that its common for our customers to reduce email volume by 30%, eliminating occupational spam.

Ironically enough, I find myself using Twitter, Facebook, and wikis of course, to help close a couple of deals this quarter.  The modality choices perhaps say more about the customers, but its a way to cut past the noise of the inbox and stay within peripheral vision.

Late next week I'm heading to LA for spring break with the kids.  I'm going to set up an vacation autoresponder with this message:

I'm on vacation March 26th-31st and will scan email when I return.  If you need immediate Socialtext assistance, contact info@socialtext.com or 1-877-GET-WIKI.  If it really is an emergency and you have my mobile number, use it.

But if you really want to help me with email overload, edit my vacation page if you are a Socialtext employee or edit my public Vacation Message Page.  You may find its okay to communicate in public and the communication can be group and summarized with others.  Thanks in advance!

I have a feeling this is either a really great or really bad idea.

Comments

[Dan Smith]

Aloha Ross,
Thanks for the link to Luis Suarez. One of my current solutions to email is to tell people that if it is important, pick up the phone or walk to my office, as appropriate. Coffee break time is a particularly good time unless it's truly urgent and important.
Unfortunately some bosses and others think that I must be on this and that mailing list and email chain. "They know my office and cell phone numbers if they need me," was not sufficient for those higher-ups.
People -- friends and friendly colleagues -- have learned to put "Please read this one" or "You should read this" in the subject line.
That said, one of my goals for 2008 is to at least open / auto preview every non-spam email and delegate it, dump it, or act on it.
Cheers,
Dan

[Luis Suarez]

Hi Ross! Thanks a bunch for the link and for the follow up on this conversation of re-purposing work related e-mail. I really enjoyed your blog post for several reasons, including the link to Jon Mell's blog post and blog, which I happened to have missed in the past! Doh! (Two points for the blogosphere! heh)

I actually think that you are right on the money on using wikis as your Vacation Message Page as you shared in your auto-responder, as I feel they are just the perfect medium to get the right level of attention not only from yourself, but also from your peers and immediate team members, who may be able to chime in while you are away, just like you would when they are gone and you are at work. Just brilliant!

I am surely going to check it out as part of my experiments and will let folks know how I am getting along with it. Good stuff!!

w.r.t. your query on the services not responding very well, there were a few from both sides, i.e. online and offline tools. Wikis, IM, social bookmarking were having some hiccups which slowed down people participating in them, but so far, it looks like things are back to normal. At least, my count of e-mails today is on target, and the number of social interactions has doubled. So we are back in business!

Thanks again for the blog post and appreciated you sharing the auto-responder. I have put together a new blog post where I have included mine as well ;-) heh

[Jon Mell]

Hi Ross, many thanks for your link. I am hopefully meeting up with some of your colleagues in the UK at Lotusphere where we are speaking on the buiness value of Social Networking.

[Zvi Band]

Ross -

The Vacation Message Page is a really cool idea. I'm in general against auto-responders, or requiring people to take any secondary step to get in touch with you. A simple "leave a message, contact XXX in an emergency" is fine for me.

But if you are still interested you should take a look at http://awayfind.com - I really like the idea of allowing people to send you a text message, rather than giving out a phone number to call...

-Zvi