Can The Workplace Survive Without Email? (#SWChat)

Thanks to everyone who took part in this weeks Social Workplace Twitter Chat event (#SWChat).

Can The Workplace Survive Without Email?

Email is a massive drain on resources and people's time. With many conversations taking place now on social platforms, can email survive in the digital age?

Event Statistics

• No. of Tweets = not available
• No. of Contributors = 47
• Reach = 108,287
• No. of impressions = 1,059,974

Summary

Top 21 Tweets

Questions Asked

Q1) Is email reduction / removal just communication displacement to another platform and therefore offers no real value ?

Q2) What's stopping your company transitioning from email to a social communications platform today ?

Q3) Your MD decides to replace your company email server with a social comms platform in 3 years. How would your employees react ?

Q4) If you had to define an Email Charter, what top 3 tips would you like to see in it ?

Shared Reference Material

• The Death of Email by 2018 via @davidchris

Useful #SWChat Links

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Do you suffer from Social Anxiety Disorder (S.A.D)?

Have you ever been down the pub with a group of friends and interrupted a flowing conversation to answer that beep from your smartphone informing you that someone has commented on your latest Facebook status?

Maybe you have been having dinner with your family at a nice restaurant and excused yourself for the fourth time blaming it on a weak bladder because you needed to check what has been happening in your Twitter stream; a weak bladder that only manifested itself at the same time as getting your first smartphone?

Or maybe you were watching a film at the cinema and noticed a flashing coming from the hand where you are gripping your smartphone tightly, whilst your girlfriend squeezed the other hand harder and harder giving you that "don't even think about it" look?

If any of these sound familiar to you then you could have Social Anxiety Disorder (or S.A.D for short).

S.A.D is a serious disease that is spreading fast around the globe and now starting to spread to the workplace as companies start to adopt social technologies to collaborate.

If we don't act now this could turn into a worldwide epidemic!

If you already do any of the following then it could already be too late for you....

1. You cannot resist the temptation to text, instant message, tweet, or generally converse via your smartphone than watch the 238 slide PowerPoint presentation on how this weeks strategy could increase the company margin tenfold
2. You give colleagues your twitter username when they ask for your email address
3. You suggest "I'll Friend you on Facebook" when you meant to say "lets do lunch"
4. You restrict your emails to 140 characters
5. You keep a running count of the colleagues you know
6. You host twitter chats instead of telephone conferences
7. You prefix forwarded emails with RT
8. You spend 10 minutes trying to find the Like button of a document uploaded onto your intranet site
9. You refuse to talk to a colleague you don't know without a verbal introduction from one of their team members
10. You first hear that your boss has left the company via their updated LinkedIn profile

For me it's already too late....but hopefully my suffering hasn't been in vain and this blog post helps you identify the signs before Social Anxiety Disorder (S.A.D) takes another life.

What is your Social Communications Transitional Strategy?

I was recently contacted by the managing director of a large enterprise asking for advice on what was the most effective way to communicate to his employees.

This was pleasing on two fronts:

1. He was starting to question that maybe traditional communication channels, (e.g. email, newsletters etc...), are no longer the most effective way to reach his employees
2. This strategic thinking was coming from the top

His assessment of the situation within his organisation was also spot on:

• email and SMS are the most widely used today
• newsletters are no longer read in any great detail
• internal social applications (e.g. Twitter style interface, RSS, social networking etc...) are only used by a small minority of the employees

So applying Forresters' P.O.S.T methodology (People, Objectives, Strategy, Tools) to his situation I began to build up a picture to of what his long term goals were and it was clear that ultimately he needed to be on a social platform.

As the style of communication he wanted to send to his employees was short key announcements highlighting key deals they had just won, changes to his organisation etc... the internal Twitter application seemed the best fit and gave many advantages over email:

• Ability to reach a much wider audience (i.e. people in your network will retweet to others in their network, and so on)
• Ability for users to discuss and comment openly on those announcements
• Ability to send, and for users to receive, the messages through the Corporations' Instant Messenger tool – providing ease of use as majority of people already use Instant Messaging
• Messages are stored centrally and accessible by all employees
• Ability to embed communications onto a portal page / website providing real-time updates with zero admin

But the challenge was how to move the employees from email to this Twitter style application. What was needed was a Social Communications Transitional Strategy.

So this is what I recommended:

1. Set a date for the transitional period (say 3 - 6 months) and use both email and the internal Twitter style application to send your messages - this is duplication, but a necessary step in the transitional strategy
2. In each email that is sent, highlight that there is an alternative communication channel (i.e. the Twitter style application) that people can choose to receive these announcements other than via email. Also provide links to any training material or step-by-step guides to help them with any setups that are required
3. Six weeks prior to the end of your transitional period, clearly highlight in each subsequent email that these announcements via email are about to come to an end. Emphasise that if they want to continue to receive these announcements then they must transition over to the Twitter style application immediately
4. At the end of the transitional period, stop sending any announcements via email and use only the Twitter style application

At the end of this transitional period, you will end up with only those employees subscribing to these announcements who find them of value. Those that don't won't subscribe. You have avoided spamming people unnecessarily long term.

So if you are finding it difficult to reach your audience through traditional communication channels, don't be put off by social communications channels just because they are not widely used yet in your organisation. Just use the P.O.S.T method and plan your Social Communications Transitional Strategy.

1.       Use both email AND OraTweet initially for a set period of time (say 3 - 6 months)

2.       In each weekly email communication, highlight that there is also a social platform (OraTweet) that users can use to receive these communications, and instructions of how to do this and how to integrate it with PidGin (my team can help you in this)

3.       In the last 6 weeks, start encouraging people to transition over to OraTweet and highlight that these email communications will stop after this time

Email is losing ground to Social Communications

I recently delivered a Social Enterprise marketing campaign titled "Being Social...More Than Just Talking" where the purpose was to raise awareness inside the enterprise that Being Social is not just about tools, it's about a work style change.

The campaign followed Steve, a Sales Communications Specialist, who was a bit of a social sceptic but was open minded to listen. He went on a social journey of discovery and soon realised that by being better socially connected with his colleagues he could be more collaborative AND more productive. Though he didn't managed to reduce his caffeine intake too much ;-)

The campaign was delivered on 3 fronts:

• An introductory email to 25,000 employees
• A poster campaign
• A set of 5 Diary Entry videos (done in the style of Bridget Jones) - one released each day for a week

The campaign has been received very favourably (average marks 9/10 by the employees) and I have had numerous requests to do a follow up Diary Series. BUT what was interesting was the statistics on the initial email that went out.

The email introducing the marketing campaign went out on a Monday morning. Of those 25,000 employees who received it only 5,569 actually opened the email (22%) on the Monday. By the end of the week this figure had increased marginally to 6,310 (25%).

Just let me reiterate that:

three quarters of the workforce had not even bothered to open the email before deciding to discard or delete it

Now there are other factors that have to be taken into consideration here like:

• was it holiday season?
• was the subject heading interesting?
• does the sender have influence and respect of the employees?

The answers to these questions are no, subjective, and again subjective respectively (though the name of the programme was used rather than a senders name here to provide more credibility).

The conclusion I draw from this is that if you want to communicate a message to the masses you can no longer rely only on traditional communication channels but you must use a combination of both traditional and social communication platforms. This is true inside and outside the enterprise.

The days of email blast campaigns are coming to an end.

Welcome to the Social Communication Revolution!