Janet Lee Johnson | The Art of Marketing

By 2009, the Radicati Group has predicted that the average knowledgeworker will spend 41% of her time managing email. That’s astounding, but not out of the question in my opinion. One of the side effects of all the social media and “web 2.0″ collaboration tools available to us is a huge increase in email.

In an article a couple weeks ago in the Wall Street Journal, Rebecca Buckman said:

“Email overload is now considered a much bigger workplace problem than traditional email spam. Inboxes are bulging today partly because of what some are calling “colleague spam” — that is, too many people are indiscriminately hitting the “reply to all” button or copying too many people on trivial messages, like inviting 100 colleagues to partake of brownies in the kitchen. A good chunk of today’s emails are also coming from brand new sources, like social- and business-networking sites like Facebook Inc. and LinkedIn Corp., or text messages forwarded from cellphones.”

I am both guilty of spreading the problem to colleagues (I’m a Facebook and LinkedIn user) and often invite them to connect with me. I’m not so worried about that “good chunk” of email sources - since (at least for me) they have high business value.

My issue is with email from within organizations whereby the cc: list wraps names like garlands on a tree. At that point, people - blog it - your subscribers can choose to:

• react by commenting on your post publicly (within your firewall)
• engage in a 1:1 dialogue with you about your post (in email - an appropriate use)
• start a new threaded discussion that could benefit the entire organization

I’m talking not only about banana bread in the lunchroom; I’m talking planning for an upcoming customer visit, product launch, brand discussion, patch release, product enhancement, research project.

As I’ve noted many times before, email is no longer the venue for such collaborations when we have tools like Clearspace, Wordpress, and Attensa’s RSS platform.

Employees can then opt-into discussions they care about, and ignore those they don’t - at their own time, on their own terms, and under their own controls.

Arketi just released a study of how journalists use the web. I wasn’t surprised by their topline findings at all. But when I downloaded the free report here, I was surprise by some of the details.

Topline findings:

90% of journalists say they turn to industry sources for story ideas, an equal number get story ideas from news releases and a nearly equal number say they tap into public relations contacts.

• 79% of journalists report finding story ideas on newswires
• 74% say from Web sites
• 72% say from other media outlets
• 54% look for story ideas in the blogosphere

Here’s where it got interesting for me:

Only half of journalists surveyed utilized RSS for their research. I’m assuming they’d rather wander about in search engines than utilize smart tools (free RSS readers abound, I use Attensa for Outlook) to keep an eye out for ideas and information for them.

With all the clutter and “noise” online, I would think that those who do research for a living (as any marketer should - at least part of the time) would utilize every smart tool available to increase relevancy, productivity and time to market all at once.

Scott over at Attensa, in a post called “Enterprise RSS: Why Not Just Use Google Reader?” put it very succinctly, as he usually does:

“[RSS] can help identify (and hopefully reduce) occupational spam and be a driver for improving the quality of… communications.”

Frankly, if more editors and marketers would even just use Google reader, they’d be taking the first step toward true productivity. And if news organizations would help their poor editors out by adopting true enterprise RSS tools for their editors, the entire organization would be taking generational leaps forward - productivity drives business these days.

I got spanked a while ago (in semi-private - doggone it, or we all could have chimed in) for making comparisons between the southern California wildfires and social media jumping firewalls into organizations. My reader was offended by the message that social media would creep into organizations, even if IT didn’t sanction it and the corollary about firewalls.

I was heartened this morning when I logged into my IT Toolbox account, (IT Toolbox is a social media group for IT decision makers) and read the results of a survey they just posted.

The Executive decision makers they surveyed ranked social media sources the most trusted information source for making purchasing decisions, paralleling consumers’ trust in WOM.

Now most of my research friends would tell you that anyone who joins a social network is likely to rate them more highly than those who don’t. Agreed. Next…
To see the level of trust in peers (vs. paid analyst research, for example) for these folks is not surprising at all to me. The majority of those surveyed were from companies with fewer than 1000 people, and probably couldn’t afford the expense of a Gartner or IDC subscription anyway… so whom do they turn to for information? Their peers - probably previously unknown to them.

Social media connections (my LinkedIN invitations come in much more often now) are providing real research tools for knowledge workers.

And (by the way - for those who might also think I’m completely heartless) my sister, who’s family was evacuated twice during the fire, never once complained about the corollary I drew. And (as I noted) just last week she invited me to be her friend in Facebook.

Now there’s some irony!

I just read a fantastic article by Chad Stoller of the media shop Organic over on ClickZ called “Where Has All of the Innovation Gone?” In it he bemoans the lack of enthusiasm and excitement he’s starting to see in his (widget) development team. He fondly remembers the fire and spirit of the early days of the web, where people were afraid to sleep because they might miss something.

Now, I’m not going to go that far - I (and the people around me) desperately need my sleep. But the suggestions Chad made to reenergize the office were excellent. It was hard to pick a favorite, but here’s the most practical:

“The Pizza Principle John Manoogian III, a former Organic and long-time friend insists work can only get done in a small team. The more people you add, the greater your chances of distraction and project disruption. So, he insists that if you ever need to order more than two pizzas to feed your team, your team is too big. I agree. Smaller teams force greater responsibility and decision making onto fewer people. And those on a smaller team will be responsible for answering their own questions and avoid the lingering delays associated with, “I’m waiting for someone to call me back.”"

Check out the entire article for more inspiration - involving Etch-a-Sketches and “Working off Scraps.” I’ve just exposed a slice of the wisdom in the article.

The guy can write.

Lee Aase, a friend and blogger in MN, calls social media ignorance among PR professionals “bordering on malpractice” in an entertaining and educational post called: 12-Step Social Media Program for PR Pros.

Lee’s always busy on the speaker tours (which is where I met him), as he’s done a ton with social media and blogging for the Mayo Clinic.

I am always interested in seeing healthcare institutions and practitioners embrace new communication tools, and Lee has been carrying a torchlight and providing useful tips that I hope others will follow.