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07.09.08 Has Social Media Replaced E-mail?  By Luis Suarez Continuing further with the nice momentum of the large number of reactions that the recent article I published in the NYTimes, I Freed Myself From E-Mail's Grip, has been creating over the last few days I thought I would touch base today on one of the blog posts, and its extended commentary, that I have enjoyed the most from the perspective of touching basis on a series of items I have been dealing with over the last few months as well. 
Yes, I am talking about the really nice blog post put together by Kevin Purdy at Lifehacker titled "[Ask the readers] Can Social Tools Really Replace Email?".
The article itself questions whether social tools are ready to replace e-mail or not and comes to some very interesting conclusions that I thought I would touch base on. Those final thoughts are actually not coming up from Kevin alone, but by the Lifehacker readers and while going through them I just couldn't help thinking how hard I have hit the nerve with this particular topic. I tell you, every day I am more convinced that this blog is going to shift gears into becoming "Thinking out of the Inbox". Anyway, what I would like to do in this blog post is to comment on a couple of items Kevin mentions as well as some of the comments folks have been leaving behind debating whether they could give up on corporate e-mail or not. Rather fascinating read, indeed, as most of the issues they indicate are issues I faced myself way at the beginning, but five months onwards, none of them are still lingering around... Thus ready? Here we go:
"Assuming you could convince your superiors to install the needed tools and let you give it a try, could you see yourself benefiting from internal social networking instead of endless email replies?" This is quite an interesting and provocative question from Kevin. One that I was doubtful about providing an answer many many years ago, but not today. Convincing my superiors to install the needed tools? Hummm, not sure what you would think about this one folks, but I doubt most knowledge workers would care about this any longer. Unless the information & knowledge shared may well be of a confidential nature to the business, I doubt they would care to share the rest inside the corporate firewall. On the contrary, even if their superiors are not very much in favour of providing the tools, people are still going out there and use other social tools, anyway!
Although I will comment on that blog post at a later time as well, Steve Rubel has put it quite nicely in a recent blog post when talking about Independent's Day: Digital Nomads Rising. Go and have a read and you will know what I mean. In short, with the massively rampant innovation going on at the moment out there in the consumer space, knowledge workers have got plenty more opportunities and choices to share what they know with others using social tools outside of the company's firewall that not long ago didn't even exist. Yet, today, they are all over the place, rather pervasive and waiting for everyone to chime in, which brings in another interesting question with regards to Intellectual Capital and Intellectual Property rights, but that would be the subject for another blog post at some point in time. Still I am not sure that knowledge workers would need to convince their superiors to have those social tools in place. They will not care much, they will just do it. It's already happening and big time! Moving on forward, I am just going to focus now on a few of the comments that were shared on that particular blog post and which I think are rather an indication of the kind of challenge we are all facing, if we would want to adopt Enterprise 2.0 social tools beyond just the pilot or trial out phases. There are plenty of them, so will try to keep my comments short ... Continue reading this article. About the Author: Luis Suarez has been working in the fields of Knowledge Management, collaboration, communities, and learning for the past seven years, and is heavily involved in social computing and its adoption within the enterprise. Luis shares his insights on important KM issues of today through The Knowledge Management Blog and ELSUA.NET, and is an active participant in the ITtoolbox blogging community. |
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