eMedia Daily

eMail is Dead.

Even though this article from Fast Company isn’t about email marketing - it raises interesting points about how email and online communication are used in today’s business world.

“The average corporate email account receives 18 MB of mail and attachments each business day, according to the analyst firm Radicati Group; the figure is projected to grow to 28 MB a day by 2011. No wonder there’s a fledgling movement afoot to periodically declare “email bankruptcy”–delete all your saved emails and start over. Never fear; less extreme solutions are being implemented by corporations fed up with wasted resources.”

The businesses they talked to undertook the following to relieve themselves of email overload:
1 - Write more compelling and read-able emails. Don’t just look at the email message you are writing as the start of a conversation - by looking at email as an electronic memo instead, you can highlight the points you need to make. Emails that are better written are also more easily found for future reference.
2 - Make use of RSS feeds for internal communications. Does everyone in every branch office need to know that Sally from Accounting had a baby? Or that the air conditioning is going to be under repair for the Toledo office? Creative use of RSS feeds allows employees to get the information that they need, without the email glut that comes from broadcast messages to the entire company.
3 - Instant Messenger isn’t just for teens anymore. By using IM to have short conversations, and ask questions, you save both time and valuable resources. It can be used for everything from reserving a conference room, to assisting in conference calls without having to be on the phone. Note: Make sure to set aside some time away from IM during your workweek. While it is convenient, IM is also very distracting, and can make giving a project full concentration difficult.