Group items tagged

If you file your emails into folders in your email program you're wasting your time, according to a study by IBM Research. The 345-user study found that people who used the search function in their email program could find relevant emails as easily as those who had categorised each email into folders. Finding emails by searches took on average 17 seconds, versus 58 seconds finding the emails by folder. The likelihood of success - that is, finding the intended email - was no greater when it had been filed in a folder. "People who create complex folders indeed rely on these for retrieval, but these preparatory behaviours are inefficient and do not improve retrieval success. In contrast, both search and threading promote more effective finding," the study said.

Has email become the new fax machine? Thierry Breton, Atos Origin CEO and Chairman, would have you believe so. Following through with a promise made earlier this year to eliminate email use among company employees, Breton plans to move beyond email within the next eighteen months and initiate a communication policy based on instant messaging and social media sites. As Atos Origin is a major international information technology company, the decision to abandon email has the potential to influence other companies' methods of communication among employees.

The daily email deluge is the scourge of productivity, but how can you stem the tide? Over at Six Pixels of Separation, Twist Image president Mitch Joel offers his tips for handling email overload. His advice goes over some ground we've covered about before, such as using rules and folders/labels, but one tip really stood out to me: You should tell people in your emails how to work with you.

Interesting on many levels. First is the fact that this entire agency works on big projects in a sort of competition. Second is that a smaller group of employees used email to self-organize a critique (however sophomoric) of the teams of creatives. Third is the danger that one person's lack of digital fluency (he hit the wrong button), or perhaps the organization's lack of digital fluency (could they have been having these discussions on a less-private medium than email?) presented. The fourth is the fact that a powerful/dangerous/fortuitous sort of serendipity emerged. 

Guest Blogger How Zappos makes social media a part of its company culture By Guest Blogger on January 10, 2011 | 1412317 Commentshttp%3A%2F%2Fsmartblogs.com%2Fsocialmedia%2F2011%2F01%2F10%2Fhow-zappos-makes-social-media-a-part-of-its-company-culture%2FHow+Zappos+makes+social+media+a+part+of+its+company+culture2011-01-10+13%3A32%3A19Guest+Bloggerhttp%3A%2F%2Fsmartblogs.com%2Fsocialmedia%2F%3Fp%3D14123 * * Share94 * * * Email * * Share94 * * * Email This post was written by SmartBrief technology editor Susan Rush. When it comes to social media, Zappos.com just gets it. Social media is not just a business strategy, it should be part of the culture, said Zappos' Thomas Knoll during the "Social Media in Action: Philosophies, Strategies and Tactics That Consistently Win" panel discussion at the International Consumer Electronics Show on Friday. Knoll said too much emphasis is often put on the "media" part of social media, adding that he is "a much bigger fan of the social part." The goal of social media is to connect and build relationships with customers.

"On Twitter, a JetBlue rep asked me to Direct Message (DM) them my confirmation number. Once I did, 18 short minutes later they had not only replied via DM that the flight had been re-booked to my new specifications, the confirmation email had already hit my email inbox. In less than 140 characters - easiest flight rebooking ever!"

Though this study is informative and interesting, there are some serious limitations that should be taken into account if we are to generalize its results to all situations of collective action (like organizations). We may do a longer writeup some time in the future, but here are a few questions that it raises: Oh, and here is a link to the original paper: http://ow.ly/3VaS4 -----Is this a problem of the technology, or of fluency with the technology?---- "This is the danger with lean media, and is especially frustrating because it implies that if a willingness to cooperate can be effectively conveyed to other group members-perhaps an easier problem to fix than curing opportunistic intent-the problems of non-cooperation..they just did not know if they could rely on others to reciprocate." (p. 119) These conclusions suggest that fluency with a medium and the norms of communication through that medium may play a significant role in trust. In other words, if i am not good at communicating my intent to cooperate within the limitations of any medium (including face-to-face speech), i will have a hard time building trust. ----Are all digital media still as "lean" as email was in 2005?--- This study bases its concept of "media richness" on 1986 work by Daft and Lengel which suggested a continuum of media richness that contains face-to-face on the "rich" end and things like reports on the "lean" end. The assumption that social media, MMORPG's, digital collaboration platforms, etc are also at the lower end with email is very, very questionable.  ----Can we generalize the behavior of business students to all situations of collective action?---- The participants were all upper-level business students from the early 2000's, who are socialized and train to deal with colle

----Norms of anonymity may have changed since 2005---- There seems to have been an increase in people using digital technologies (especially social media) as a way to build their identity, rather than anonymize it. In fact, services have sprung up to provide people with personal landing pages (http://lifehacker.com/#!5534456/five-best-personal-landing-pages). If this is true, then there is likely a corresponding pressure to build and maintain trust in a world of digital trails and easy search.

In the digital age, we increasingly use written language in place of face to face chat or phone calls. But the advantages email, chat, and text give us in speed come with limitations in communicating emotional tone. Enter emoticons and emojis. Not just a playful supplement to language, these new tools allow for complexity in tone and emotion never before possible in written language, as well as provide new opportunities for creative expression. Rapidly spreading throughout culture, emoticons and emojis fill a void in written language that few realized we so desperately needed.

Maeda acknowledges that he now understands that social media can only take you so far in redesigning leadership. All those great hopes for leading by blogging, tweeting, and emailing proved inadequate to the gritty business of persuading an actual living, breathing constituency to follow his direction.

crowdSPRING's blog about design, digital creativity, business strategy and more.