More on Social Media As Email Reduction Strategy

A few weeks ago, I saw a tweet by Ben Greenberg about a presentation he was preparing about blogging behind the firewall which lead to my post,  "Blogging Behind the Nonprofit Firewall: ROI Approach"  Patrick Lambe riffs on this:

“The more we can siphon off the non-time sensitive stuff into channels that are more suited to them, the more we’ll be able to calm the raging torrent of email that threatens to drown us.”

Library clips picks up the thread with a detailed analysis of enterprise email and blogging processes and talks about where blogs shine over email for particular types of communication.  Also described is different types of internal blogs:

• Office - announcements/news/releases
• Project/Business Unit - announcements/news/releases
• Smaller teams - announcements/news/releases
• Activity - share/correspond/updates
• Work (group/individual) - eg. support tips
• Interest (group/individual) - eg. topic blogs
• Personal (private/public) - a person’s log on their experience, thoughts, feedback, etc…

There is also a good list of other resources on this topic:

Email is great as it allows very simple unstructured free form correspondence, but it doesn’t do the discussion, and archiving part well at all. Blogs are just as simple and unstructured, its forte is publishing, subscription, longevity, etc…in fact here is 10 reasons why blogs are better than email.

Blogs are not the only social tools that can have more impact than just relying on email, check out: Instead of sending an email…

Here are three blogs posts about internal blogging:

Project Blogs, Email, and Dual Collaboration Channels (adoption)
Project Management Blogs - How to Run Your Project on the Web (types)
How to use Blogs in the Workplace (approach)

Here are some posts about why email is strong and how it can help web adoption:

Email is critical to Enterprise 2.0 and Office 2.0
Email: The Good Enough Collaboration Tool

Speaking of other tools, Stewart Mader, of Wiki Patterns, is running a series, "21 Days of Wiki Adoption."  Day 2 is a discussion of wiki versus email.  ZUP 4 Nonprofits suggests it might lead to better collaboration and a smaller in-box.