4TM: Social Media for Business

Inbox Buster! Use Social Media To Reduce Your Email by 80%

“Some ideas for better collaboration - don’t use email”, writes David Sim.

Many of us suffer from over-full email inboxes, so anything that helps address the problem is very welcome.

Luis Suarez of I.B.M. turned to social media to relieve the load from email. In an article for the New York Times, he describes how he used Wikis, instant messaging and blogging to break the cycle of email and email response. His aim was not to communicate less, but to communicate more efficiently.

Over in his blog he makes an important point, so often missed by people using email as a key application in project management or collaborative ventures:

As a communication tool e-mail can be a good thing; however, as a collaboration tool it lacks some of the most significant elements from any kind of collaboration: openness, transparency, taking responsibility & ownership, co-authorship, co-llaborate etc.

Suarez is based in the Canary Islands, and reports to managers in the US and in the Netherlands, increasing his need to communicate and collaborate effectively despite time differences and distance.

Some great ideas inspired by his article:

• Use instant messaging for conversations - you get instant replies and can clear up misunderstanding. Move it to the telephone if it’s going to last a while;
• Use blogs to get a message out to a number of people at once - be it project team members, employees or customers. Everyone can see comments made by others, avoiding you becoming a funnel for communication;
• Wiki’s can be a great place to create documentation or build knowledge;
• Create a private or public group on a site like Facebook to let everyone get to know more about each other and build trust and understanding;
• Share files on a file sharing site or central space where everyone can get to them. (http://drop.io/ might be worth a look). It means that everyone in the team can make use of them.

Suarez says spending a little time on education is important here - you need to bring your team, colleagues, partners or clients up to speed on how to use these tools. 4TM can help with our new Social Media Training Centre.

Read his blog.

Read the New York Times article.