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 [email protected] 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.
