It's #SocialFriday y'all

 

At first blush it can seem funny to me that NewsGator, an enterprise social computing software vendor, has one day of the week designated as a "no email” day.  Why not every day?  As you would expect we are power-users of our own stuff.  You’ll often hear this called “Eating our own dog food”.  (I’ve often wondered why it couldn’t be something like “Eating our own pizza” or “Using our own software”, but I digress.)  Anyway, like many organizations there are certain departments that tend to be more active participants than others.  And as we continue to bring new team members on board we need to make sure they see how deeply ingrained social is in our organization.  We are very social at NewsGator, however the point of #SocialFriday is to eliminate all email unless it is external or truly confidential.  It’s just a matter of showing benefits in order to get people to break the email habit that has been beaten into us for 20+ years.

The genesis of #SocialFriday happened at a customer site.  Ronnie Gilbertson (NewsGator PM extraordinaire) and I were onsite working with the customer project team which included Vinicius and Ryan.  As an exercise we walked through Vinicius’s email inbox to see how much was truly confidential and how much would have benefited the larger community.  About 90% of his email could have been eliminated.  Some of the discussions still would have needed to happen but by happening in a community there would have been more transparency.  Other discussions would have been simply eliminated because Vinicius may not have cared about that particular message and would have chosen not to follow that community / channel.  The other portion of email that could have been eliminated was because there were multiple branches growing from an original email root and it was hard to tell which ones he needed to save in order to stay on topic.  We started talking about ways to get people out of email so that the knowledge would be shared and captured for current and future employees (think project status or an answer about the best temperature at which to melt cheese).  Ryan had the great idea of turning on his internal Out of Office message in Outlook and forcing people to communicate with him in the activity stream/microblogging.  Since the customer hadn’t deployed at that point it was just at the brainstorming phase for them.

Well Ronnie, NewsGator PM extraordinaire, took the brainstorming session to heart and started turning on his Out of Office message on Fridays.  Many of us soon followed suit.  Here’s my OOO message:

 

It’s #SocialFriday y’all.  I've purposely turned on my out of office for internal emails.  We are THE social computing company for the enterprise and I want to utilize our product in a way that sets an example for our customers.  For this reason I will be participating in an activity to help dramatically reduce email and relies more on our product.  This will also increase transparency with what's happening in our accounts and in the solutions consulting organization.  If you need me, don’t expect a response via email today unless your message is truly confidential.  You can target me @christys in your activity stream.  If this is customer-related please target the customer community as well. 
I hope you join me in the Social Friday effort!

 

It’s at the point now that many people’s OOO messages just say something very Zen like “Find me in the stream”.

I may not turn on my OOO the other days of the week (in fact I may stop altogether) but if I do get an internal email I’ll often answer it in the activity stream, targeted at the person who asked.  The increased transparency benefits everyone.  A couple of weeks ago I received an email from one of our sales reps about how we were using a certain product feature at a customer.  Instead of answering via email I answered in the customer community and targeted the sales rep.  Lo and behold our VP of Product saw the comment and chimed in that we are about to release a new feature and if we made a small tweak it could benefit the customer in the use case I had described.  Did I think the customer would use it?  Yes, please!  If I had simply responded to the one person in email it would have ended there.  Instead we are making a customer happy with a new feature I didn’t even know was in the works.  That’s pretty cool.

So yeah, we started our “SocialFriday effort to eliminate the majority of internal email at NewsGator but it’s turned into #AllSocialAllTheTime.  It just goes to show that a little reinforcement never hurts even in the most socially savvy organizations.

 

What about you?  Any tips to share on how you are changing behaviors to take advantage of social business in your organization?

Comments

[Vinicius da Costa]

It's great to see this happening and the tranformation it will cause in the workspace. E-mail is not a collaboration tool.

[milton]

Thank you for nice information

[San Antonio Social Media Marketing]

I really like this idea. It nudges people toward the social and away from the one dimensional aspect of email. I like what Vinicius said: "E-mail is not a collaboration tool." Well said.

[Rhhender]

Instead of “Eating our own dog food” how about "Drinking our own champagne"?

[C Corpo]

What a great idea. I also like what Vinicius said: "E-mail is not a collaboration tool." How true it is!

[John]

That is a great idea, I think we should do this at our business to.

[Jucarii]

We already implemented that to our business, a few months ago and it's just great.