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Blog posts tagged communications
Email is dead: long live instant messaging
May 17, 2012
When I tell people that email won’t be around in five years’ time, they look at me like I’m mad. It’s true though – email hasn’t changed for 20 years, and we all know what happens to technology that doesn’t change. It dies.
Email is as secret as Twitter
At a presentation I did recently, I told people email wasn’t secure. To illustrate this point, I explained that information sent by email is as open as your Twitter stream, as long as you know where to look for it.
Some members of the audience looked at me in shock, admitting to sending all sorts of sensitive data via good old Microsoft Outlook.
I went on to explain that instant messaging is the future for corporate communications. I don’t care if you don’t believe me. It’s true and now I’ll explain why.
Twenty years ago people did business over the phone. When you needed something from someone, you picked the phone up or went to their desk, had a conversation and got what you needed.
Email changed all that. We became accustomed to sending a request for information, waiting for a reply, replying to the reply, waiting for another reply … and so on. A conversation that could have taken a few minutes turns into a four-hour email trail.
The only positive aspect is that email gives us an audit trail. I’m not sure about you but to me that feels like a backwards step. Of course, we didn’t see it like that at the time.
Real-time communication is changing
Well, the world of real time communication is changing and instant messaging is the new black, if you’ll excuse the cliché. Now when I want to discuss a subject I can go into my copy of Outlook and click ‘reply with IM’:
This instantly opens a text, voice or even video conversation with recipient. You can discuss the subject and get an outcome - and best of all the entire chat is recorded in Outlook so you can check what you actually said. You can even share data directly from Microsoft Word or Excel using the share button in the review tab.
Of course, these functions aren’t only available in Microsoft Outlook. There are plenty of other services that do similar things, including free ones like Skype. So, next time you’re tempted to hit ‘reply all’, why not try instant messaging instead?
- Five email blunders you really don’t want to make
- Ten ways to use email effectively
- Five free conferencing tools
Lee Wrall is founder and MD of Everything Tech, an IT support and service provider based in Manchester.
What on earth is unified communications anyway?
May 03, 2012
You can’t read about business communications these days without seeing a mention of unified communications. It’s a great bit of jargon, but what on earth does it mean?
As business technology continues to develop, more and more communication channels are being opened. Tools like instant messaging, email and mobile phones make staying in touch more efficient and practical, regardless of distance and budget.
In the past, you’d have had to switch between different devices and channels to keep in touch with clients or partners. As the number of possible communication channels has grown, that’s started to become unmanageable and complicated.
Step forward unified communications, which combines these different tools into one system, so you can stay in touch more easily.
Elements of unified communications
The very nature of unified communications means it’s flexible – and that’s part of the problem when it comes to defining what it actually does. However, it covers five broad areas:
- Messaging. This brings together main forms of communication – like fax, email, voicemail and text messaging – and integrates them with your calendars and contact details. All these different things are grouped in one ‘inbox’, which you can access from your computer or mobile phone – so you don’t have to switch devices to use different communication methods.
- Instant messaging. In essence, instant messaging is online chat. You communicate with others by sending and receiving short text messages in an online chat window. Instant messaging can be fast and secure, and you can set your instant messaging system up to keep a record of all messages sent.
- Presence. This is becoming an increasingly important part of modern business communications. Presence technology enables you to see if your contacts are available or not. For instance, you can see if a colleague is in a meeting or away from their desk. Presence information ensures attempts to reach other people aren’t wasted, and makes it easier to keep in touch with remote workers.
- Conferencing. Reach employees, customers and partners without having to travel long-distances. Conferencing systems can be voice-only, or include video too, so you can see the different people taking part. Conferencing is a good way to hold remote meetings and build closer links with people outside your business.
- Voice over internet protocol (VOIP). A little more jargon for you here, but VOIP simply means that your telephone calls are sent over the internet as digital 1s and 0s, rather than down ordinary phone lines. This can dramatically reduce your costs and makes things much more flexible, allowing your telephones to be linked with the other elements of your unified communications system. Learn more about VOIP >>
A unified communications system will be flexible and modular, meaning you can combine these core elements – and some others – however you want.
Other elements include mobile access, collaboration tools to aid document sharing, speech recognition and call control. A good IT supplier will be able to help you understand the benefits and create a system that’s right for you.
SynergyPlus provides telephony and technology solutions for businesses.
Now is the time to clean up your inbox
January 23, 2012
According to research, 2.8 million emails per second were sent in 2010. Given that incredible figure (I wonder who counted them all), it’s no surprise that email overload is an ever-growing problem.
You probably know the feeling. You start work in the morning by opening your email. It takes an hour – or more – to deal with all the queries in your inbox. And then you seem to spend most of the rest of the day replying to replies to the email you sent first thing. Confusing, isn’t it?
Your inbox is a source of stress
My own data indicates that almost half of us in the UK receive 50 – 70 emails a day. Some people receive 180 or even more! For all the noise about social media becoming the communications channel of choice, the numbers show that business email isn’t going anywhere anytime soon.
Yet most of us need less than half of the email we receive. Just think of all the pointless one-line replies, the emails you were copied in on out of politeness and, of course, the newsletters, the special offers, the junk, the spam you have no intention of reading but which still takes time and effort to sort through and delete.
Email overload takes up people’s time and causes stress. But there’s another reason businesses need to address this problem: money.
The bottom line to email overload
On average, we each lose an hour a day because of ineffective email use. At an hourly cost of £20, that’s about £4,200 of lost productivity for every single person a year. Does your business really need that in the current economic climate?
Many companies are waking up to this. Volkswagen has taken an extreme route, deciding that the best way to give its people some respite is to block out-of-hours email altogether. Fine, but doesn’t that just move the problem to the next morning rather than solving it completely?
You can do a lot with better planning. Cut down on the number of unnecessary emails you send and be realistic about replying. Take a stand against the culture of replying instantly to everything and instead develop a system to help you identify which emails are important, which can wait, and which should go straight in the bin.
Clean out your inbox next week
Together, we can put an end to email overload. And the work starts right there, in the folder marked ‘inbox’. If you’re willing to give it a go, I can help: my company, Mesmo, is running Clean Out Your Inbox Week – and it starts today!
Together with fellow email expert Marsha Egan I’ll be offering hints, tips and online tools to help you get on top of your email. We’ll explain how to get rid of email noise, what to do to prioritise emails and why email etiquette matters.
It’s completely free and you might even get the chance to win a prize! To get more information and take part, head over to my blog.
Monica Seeley is an email and productivity expert who runs Mesmo. Learn more about email overload and email etiquette on her website.
Good email etiquette costs nothing and is worth a lot
February 28, 2011
Have you ever received no reply to an email? Is it down to email overload, arrogance or plain bad manners?
There is no need to say thank for each and every email you receive. However there is a time a place when a simple response is needed.
No reply, no relationship
Recently a well-established trade magazine asked for volunteers to write expert online columns. They never either acknowledged or replied to my email. Is this because they feel no need to demonstrate the basic simple courtesy just blogged by Ted Coine or is the requesting editor's email inbox so overstuffed they don't read half their emails?
Worst of all, is it old guard establishment arrogance?
No excuse for bad manners
Compare this experience with a smaller, newer website which made the same request and have taken the time to reply and nurture our relationship. They've even created a learning experience for me as an added bonus.
It’s a competitive market no matter what your business, but especially for online content. Just look at AOL’s takeover of the Huffington Post. All email software lets you send automatic responses and create template emails to use to say ‘thanks but the post has been filled’. There is no excuse for bad manners.
What do you think? Who would you rather give your business to?
Image from Flickr user CarbonNYC under a Creative Commons licence.
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