Easier to marginalize email than to kill it

Asking your teammates to give up their inboxes is not going to make you many friends.  Today I’m going to outline a way to free your office from the burdens of email misuse without forcing anyone to let go of their Blackberry or GMail security blankets.

Permit me to re-use this old graphic from a previous post. I drew it to illustrate a point about offering multiple avenues to contribute to your knowledge network.  Now it appears I had the key to moving beyond an email-dominated office culture months ago but I just didn’t realize it.

I’ve posted in this space before about the misuse of the medium: Microblogs like Twitter let our quick notes scale to millions of readers. Wikis and forums provide a tighter workflow for collaborative writing and editing. Just putting your words on a web site makes them searchable by people who will never have access to your email corpus.  Despite these misuses of email, it’s still the ubiquitous method of digital communication.  Whatever new communications platform you’re hoping to deploy, it had better link up to your email system if you want it to thrive.

Stack social media, RSS, and e-mail to satisfy multiple audiences

Here’s the plan: Set up the microblogs and wikis and forums your team needs. Be sure your teammates can log on with minimal effort – one thing SharePoint gets right is the single sign on feature.  Provide the means to track updates to these office social networks via RSS. Yes, most of them aren’t using RSS now.  It’s okay.  Just make sure you meet them halfway with an easy setup and let them know it’s there for them.  Lastly, automate an RSS to e-mail connection from your new networks to your teammate’s inboxes.  Feedburner provides just such a service for this blog.  It’s not hard if you find the right tools.

The middle manager who lives in meetings now gets your wiki edit notices delivered to her mobile’s inbox.  The cubicle worker who wants to keep track of your projects is getting the RSS stream in his browser.  Subject matter experts are getting things done on the team’s new social tools, and each contributor is able to track progress the manner most comfortable to them.

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