Social tools help improve business communications, increase collaboration and nurture innovation, but what do you do if people won't use them? And how do you grow from a pilot to company-wide use?
The Email Problem and How To Solve It
3 Sept 08
Email is becoming a problem, with people sending and receiving hundreds each day. 'No Email Days' don't help, nor do inbox size limits. So just how do you reduce email and improve people's relationship with their inbox?
Suw Charman-Anderson is a social software consultant and writer who specialises in the use of blogs and wikis behind the firewall. With a background in journalism, publishing and web design, Suw is now one of the UK's best known bloggers, frequently speaking at conferences and seminars.
She recently launched Kits and Mortar, a blog about planning a green, cat-friendly self-built home. Her personal blog is Chocolate and Vodka, and yes, she's married to Kevin.
Kevin Anderson has been an online journalist since 1996, designing, editing and writing websites for both broadcast and print media. In 1998, he joined the BBC and became their first online journalist based outside of the UK, covering the US for its award winning news website. After coming to the UK in 2005, he developed a blogging strategy for BBC news, helped launch a programme on the BBC's 5Live covering weblogs and podcasts and was on the team that launched the interactive radio programme World Have Your Say on the BBC World Service.
Kevin is now the Blogs Editor for The Guardian, where he is responsible for management, strategy and 'leading by doing' for Guardian Unlimited blogs.
Kevin: Rick Burnes gives an excellent review of the Faneuil Media, what worked, what didn't and most importantly what they learned. Learn constantly. Cycle constantly. What's the business?
Kevin: Colin Mulvany, the new multimedia editor at The Spokesman-Review in Spokane, Washington, gives a list of brilliant tips for shooting video. Lots of shot ideas for new shooters.
Kevin: via Martin Stabe Spiegel Online reports that Deutsche Telekom is set to introduce an e-paper device. The 'News4Me' device is to be tested in the autumn. Just one problem: It doesn't have a news content partner yet…
Kevin: The intentions of Copley Press and Advance Publications to explore the sale of two of their signature properties represents a discouraging new lack of confidence in the future of metro newspapers.
Kevin: Mark Glaser has a lengthy and incredibly useful interview with Vickey Williams from the Media Management Center at Northwestern University. Increbily useful information on cultural challenges in news organisations.
Kevin: Kristine Lowe, Journalism.co.uk’s blogger on online journalism in Scandinavia, discovers how Norwegian newspaper group A-Pressen is finding success with its social network.
Kevin: Details and discussion on the cancellation of NPR’s social media experiment, the Bryant Park Project (BPP). NPR struggling with it’s own organisation is hardly unique, but it faces some unique challenges.
Kevin: NPR’s CEO responds to the cancellation fo the Bryant Park Project. He says that it would take support from 25,000 people. That doesn’t seem like a lot of people to me.
Paul deals with distracting nature of the net by having two computers - one for ‘work’ and one for ‘online activities’ such as email and surfing. Question is, what do you do if your work resides online, in the cloud?
Kevin: A Pew study of US newspapers released today finds that national and international news coverage is declining as ad revenue plummets an emphasis shifts toward local stories. While …
Kevin: The New York Times will deliver business news to LinkedIn users based on the verticals they are interested in. Paul Bradshaw sees this as another step torwards personalised news.
Kevin: Arthur Sulzberger Jr. is racing to transform the embattled New York Times for the digital age. Is he up to the job? Source: Columbia Journalism Review
Kevin: “Despite an image of decline, more people today in more places read the content produced in the newsrooms of American daily newspapers than at any time in years. But revenues are tumbling.”
Suw: An old but interesting post from Clay Shirky about how businesses create processes in a hyper-risk-averse manner, trying to stamp out any opportunity for mistakes and instead replacing mistakes with organisational process arthritis.
Kevin: Pulitzer prize-winning journalist John McQuaid says: “But there aren’t many true innovators out there yet in positions of authority, and those who are are struggling against an archaic institutional architecture that remains despite all the layof
Kevin: This is a BusinessWeek story from 1998 chronicling the death of the New Century Network, an online newspaper coalition that never coalesced. It’s a good lesson on what not to do. Well, they didn’t do much.
Kudos both to The Economist for one of the most creative corrections to a correction ever, and also to Stephen J. Dubner of the Freakonomics blog for his humour in accepting it. It is an excellent example of how bloggers should listen as well as publish.
Kevin: The cover of a recent BusinessWeek about the runup in oil and gasoline prices framed the question of what’s causing it nicely: “Speculation or Manipulation?” But the story was maddeningly evenhanded.
Kevin: Mark Schaver rejects the view of luddite newspaper execs for the decline of the industry in the US. He points to several forward looking projects. But why did they fail?
Kevin: The World Association of Newspapers launches a rebuttal to the naysayers who say that print is dying. They are asserting the ‘power of the press’. Is this all about a loss of power?
Kevin: Journalist-intern Jessica da Silva weighs into the hyperlocal debate and comments on Rob Curley’s Loudon County Extra project at the Washington Post. Communication and integration at news orgs can definitely be improved.
Surprised by the very low figures in this article for number of enterprise blogs, also disappointed that businesses still don’t understand what blogs are all about: ‘the majority of blogs read like “tired, warmed-over press releases.”’ sigh
Suw: Amongst men, entreprenuers have more testosterone than non-entrepreneurs. Wonder if hormones in female entrepreneurs are also different from non-entrepreneurs
Suw: Women who read about other women who are successful rate themselves more positively than women who read about men, or read nothing at all. Men don’t show a difference. This illustrates the importance of role models for women
Suw: Gender stereotypes distort our memories of past achievement: women reminded of the stereotype that men do better at maths subsequently underestimated their own ability in maths; men did the same when talking about the arts
Kevin: NPR is pulling the plug on the Bryant Park Project. It was an experiment to lure young audiences to NPR, and Leonard Witt thought it was too soon to pull the plug on a promising experiment.
Kevin: National Public Radio officials are expected to tell the staff members of “Bryant Park Project” that their experimental weekday morning program is being canceled.
Kevin: Rachel Happe has a very thoughtful post cautioning people not to conflate the terms “social media” and community. I think that social interaction around media or media as a social object. One of the reasons that social media hasn’t built much commu
Suw: Do women in tech suffer from stereotype threat? Telling women that a test reveals gender differences causes them to perform worse due to stress and anxiety, compared to the same test without the stereotype threat.
Suw: How do you foster the adoption of social tools in business? How do you role out software which is essentially optional to hundreds, thousands or tens of thousands of people? Find out how in my seminar on 10 Sept 08.
Suw: Email has become a bit of a problem in business - there’s too much of it, and most of it’s rubbish. But how do you get people to send fewer emails? In this seminar, I’ll take a look at how social tools can help.
Suw: Best rant about mobile I’ve read in ages. Kev had the misfortune to get cornered by a delusional mobile entrepreneur the other day. She should read this.
Suw: “Occasionally my little tours of the web seem to develop a narrative thread all on their own. This is one of those days.” A post of links to follow
Suw: I do rather struggle with the visualisation of the future, and get frustrated with calendar software that only shows me a month at a time, 1st - 31st.
Mark Potts highlights the blog of Bob Lefsetz and says: “Trying something different, even if it seems nutty, is far preferable to stubbornly going down with the ship.”
Jeff Jarvis flags up that Tom Loosemore and blogging MP Tom Watson have launched a £20,000 prize to mashup previously ‘invisible’ public data. Good ideas already.
Paul Bradshaw says of Showusabetterway.com: “If you think FOI requests have transformed journalism in recent years, and the battle to retain those, think about this: if we don’t make the most of this opportunity, we’ll have no excuse when the governme
Barack Obama’s campaign is considering moving his nomination acceptance speech at the Democratic Convention from the Pepsi Center to Mile High Stadium. Source: Denver Post
Roy Greenslade on Trini-Mirror cuts: “The main victim of this move will by the Daily Mirror itself, a flagship that is not only losing its flagpole but its main mast.”
Sweden and other Nordic countries top list of “technological readiness” from World Economic Forum. The US drops to 9th on regulatory issues. The UK dropped out of the top 10.
Alf Hermida highlights an interesting study showing that Canadian news preference. “But only 8% said they choose newspapers because they were a source of local news. And even less said it was because they like holding a physical paper.”
The Wall Street Journal says that the Associated Press is beginning to fracture as the US newspaper business reels. Papers are beginning to push back on the fees the 162-year-old cooperative charges.
Kevin: So it begings in the British media market. Advertising down 12-14% in May and June. Sly Bailey of Trini-Mirror: “We can’t defy the gravity of the advertising market, or the economy.”
Kevin: Technology and politcs gone awry. What happens when you replace every instance of ‘gay’ with ‘homosexual’? FAIL. I bet the AP loves their content being used like this.
Kevin: “Features, I’ve recently come to realize, can be obstacles. Problems. … Determine a basic need -> Create a service that satisfies it in the simplest way possible -> Open it up.”
In the manner of Facebook and Digg, the social-news application lets people see which stories their friends are commenting on and recommending. Read this blog post by Caroline McCarthy on The Social.
Kevin: Thoughtful post about the New Yorks Times’ Times People social media tool. He likes the focused nature of the tool as opposed to baking in social networking features into the site.
Kevin: Interesting post and stats about ad spend and trends in the US and India. Mukund Mohan says that advertisers may go straight from print to mobile.
Kevin: Adam Tinworth writes a must bookmark post on why media gets community wrong. To quote one of the comments, ‘brilliant clarity’. Goes to the heart of why mass media doesn’t take advantage of social media.
Suw: To paraphrase: Social media has to be 9x better than the technologies it replaces in order to be accepted by users. Wonder how a proper adoption strategy changes that equation
Suw: Joel Spolsky on how hard it is to reach a state of flow, and now an interruption of merely a few seconds can result in a 15 minute loss of productivity for the person who has been interrupted.
Kevin: Jeff Jarvis from an internal conference at the Guardian about the Future of Journalism. Lots to think about. I like in helping find quality or interesting content, “it becomes an editorial job and knowing who people are and creating “circles of tru
Kevin: Is Fred Wilson getting bored with Web 2.0? Yes and no. He is just curious about having a more positive social and political impact, which is why he’s travelling to Europe.
Kevin: Ari Melber says: “Web entrepreneur Arianna Huffington slammed old media at a political conference in New York today, assailing reporters for abandoning the pursuit of truth in favor of a “fake neutrality” and quailing in the face of government inti
Kevin: USA Today’s Chuck Raasch wonders if journalists are painting a grimmer economic picture than actually exists because of the woes of the newspaper industry
The Personal Democracy Forum collects essays from lots of big thinkers including Esther Dyson, Yochai Benkler, Jeff Jarvis, Micah Sifry and many more on how to re-energise, reorganise and reorient US democracy for the internet age.
Suw: Amazon use their power to bully small publishers by removing one click buy buttons from the titles of those publishers who are not submitting to Amazon’s demands. Disgraceful.
Kevin: Craig draws lessons from Iain Dale’s advertising model and makes some suggestions on why Google AdSense didn’t work for him. Craig suggests improvements on ad placement and the value of an ‘online presence’.
Kevin: Robin Hamman makes it official. He’s leaving the BBC to join Headshift and head up a team of social media consultants. Congrats and good luck Robin.
Kevin: Journalist and programmer Adrian Holovaty talks about how reporters can make better use of data from his recent talk at the Guardian internal Future of Journalism conference.
Kevin: More on the AP’s ‘new aggressiveness toward bloggers’ over the Drudge Retort. “(T)he train left the station years ago.” Read the comments for more analogies. ‘Unfan the shit?’
Kevin: Fred Wilson makes a compelling argument for a post-widget web. Javascript slows page load and they are distracting. He says we need a model where the content is “all in the same flow”.
Kevin: More about the AP/bloggers flap. “Posting a link to copyright material and enough of an excerpt to encourage a click-through is a Good Thing. It drives traffic, raises visibility and weaves the source material into an ongoing conversation. Getting
Kevin: A great post on ways that news organisations should be using location-based technology to enhance their content. Must read post with lots of practical tips.
Kevin: Newspaper circulation is growing in Asia and South America, not North America or Europe. Free dailies are also surging. Growth, but maybe not where you live and work.
Kevin: Even gung-ho newspaper executives are getting gloomy about the future. “As crazy as this once sounded, I’m now convinced one or more major American markets will lose their daily newspaper within 18 months.”
Kevin: This research should be read carefully. The internet is influential not because of the medium but because of social relationships. People rely on the internet for views from other people, not from companies.
Kevin: Steve Yelvington highlights comments from Joe Kraus, dir of product dev at Google: “So, the killer apps that have really worked on the web have always been about connecting people to one another.”
Kevin: Great map from NYTimes.com. Gas prices are high throughout the country, but how hard they hit individual families depends on income levels, which vary widely.
Suw: Kevin Marks says, somewhat wonderfully, “If you behave like a disease, people develop an immune system” then goes on to give us some better ways to think about propagating memes.
Kevin: Umair Haque says that Obama toppled Hillary because: “in a hyperconnected world, instead of hoarding a critical resource, more value can be created by sharing it at the edges.”
Kevin: Stunning example of alternate ways of telling stories from the Des Moines Register of tornado that wiped out the southern third of Parkersburg, Iowa. Great package although I might lose the splash screen.
Kevin: From Martin Stabe: This slideshow showcases dozens of newspaper and journalism websites that use Drupal, the open source social publishing software.
Kevin: Innovators and entrepreneurs fail forward, and the founder of Meetro, a location-aware IM platform, has shared his lessons on TechCrunch. Success isn’t the only teacher.
Kevin: A reminder that early adopters (like me) aren’t necessarily the best indicator for mass adoption. “Are we solving problem for users or Robert Scoble?”
Kevin: A good write up on identity, privacy and Dopplr, a social network based on travel built by friends of ours. Dopplr treats your data as your data, not just theirs.
Kevin: The US military appears to be opening up to blogging after trying to restrict US service members’ blogging activity. “The subtext here is that perhaps the military can gain more flies with honey than vinegar.”
Kevin: Last week in Princeton I talked about the use of APIs, and this shows the explosive growth of API use from Amazon web services. I do see the drop in ‘revenue per gigabit’. Wonder what accounting will think of that.
Kevin: From the blog of the Frontline Club, a club for journalists in London, asking whether the debate over the journalistic use of Twitter is over. It’s incredibly useful especially with additional tools for visualisation and search.
Kevin: A great collection of ways to visualise Twitter interactions. Twitter and other social applications have huge amounts of data that can be useful for journalism.
