It's #SocialFriday Y'all (aka how to eliminate email)

So you've deployed your social business platform internally, you've built in the business value, worked on formal communications and education, but are still having troubles breaking some folks of the email habit.  (And here's why you should care.)  This is a story of a viral technique that worked for me that you might want to give a go.

I was an internal social evangelist at a company that had a high number of power-users but like many organizations there were certain departments that tended to be less active participants than others.  And as we continued to bring new team members on board we needed to make sure they saw how deeply ingrained social was in our organization.  We were very social at our company however the point of #SocialFriday was to eliminate all email unless it was 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 (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 - yes, 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/microblog.  Since the customer hadn’t deployed at that point it was just at the brainstorming phase for them.



Well Ronnie, 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.  I will be participating in an activity to help dramatically reduce email and 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 #SocialFriday effort!

It got to the point that many people’s OOO messages just said something Zen like “Find me in the stream”.

I didn't turn on my OOO the other days of the week (in fact I eventually stopped altogether) but if I did get an internal email I’d often answer it in the activity stream, targeted at the person who asked.  The increased transparency benefited everyone.  At one point I received an email from one of our sales reps about how we were using a certain product feature at a customer deployment.  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 were 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 made 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 but it 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?