Perry

Hewitt

Tag: email

  • Friday 5 — 11.08.2013

    Friday 5 — 11.08.2013

    smartphone growth

    1. Benedict Evans says mobile is eating the world, and I am inclined to believe him. Slide 7 (above) highlights remarkable smartphone growth juxtaposed against PC flatline.
    2. The news has been all TWTR all the time this week, with a few well-timed research reports and a Storify integration adding to the IPO hype. Yesterday, Twitter users Patrick Stewart, a 9-year-old girl who sold lemonade to end child slavery, and a representative from the Boston Police Department all took the podium to ring the opening bell. Perhaps overpriced at the end of the day, the media mood couldn’t have been more different from that of the Facebook IPO back in May 2012.
    3. “I need help with …” pre-fills the search box on the public launch of Google Helpouts. The service provides free and paid real-time video assistance if you’re trying to master anything from Caribbean cooking to Adobe InDesign. As video consumption surges across myriad handheld and tablet screens, the time may be right for how-to videos.
    4. I was late to the party on The Skimm, and started reading it only this summer. Warning: once you’re addicted to the 5:59 am snappy daily email of what’s going on in the world, it’s hard to stop. This week The Skimm received $1M in funding to grow their user base.
    5. More on the funding front: Newsle, the service that alerts you when your friends make the headlines, closed 1.8M in a Series A. Founded by two Harvard undergrads, the service personalizes the news for you by serving up headlines for your address book and social media contacts.

    Weekend fun: I bet you were wondering if you could watch two Harvard professors sing the names of all the Chinese dynasties to the tune of Frère Jaques. Well, sure you can.

    Every Friday, find five, highly subjective links about compelling technologies, emerging trends, and interesting ideas that affect how we live and work digitally.

  • The best news email knows mobile, adds voice

    What do effective news headlines emails have in common? First of all, they’re mobile in design and content. Here’s a daily email received yesterday from the New York Times:

    mobile NYT email

    This email arrived at 4:43 a.m., when I’m still about four hours from a laptop encounter. How could this headlines email perform better for mobile? Start with the subject line — this version teases only one story, so it’s a single-shot opportunity to grab a reader who’s thumbing through all the early morning messages. Next, look at all that navigation taking up valuable screen space. The navigation narrates the static departmental structure of the institution rather than engaging the reader, and the links don’t work on mobile. And that big CUSTOMIZE? It goes to a page designed for the desktop. Finally, as the user scrolls through the ~12 screens of content, nearly every story has a thumbnail image, many of which are extraneous or tough to parse at that size.

    [tweetable hashtags=”#news”]This email feels like a missed opportunity for what’s arguably the strongest brand in news.[/tweetable] Why not optimize for mobile readers who are likely stumbling to their first cup of coffee? There’s a second, larger opportunity to add editorial voice to this message. Don’t give me a laundry list of the entire Times — I’ll get that on a tablet or laptop, later. Instead, tell me what someone smart about today’s news thinks I should be reading.

    mobile quartz emailCompare the Times message with the same day’s Quartz weekend brief. There are four teasers in the subject line so if I’m not interested in global rebalancing, then maybe women on Wall Street? And the brief is built for mobile, with a clean, readable font.

    This email projects a strong editorial voice. The New York Times leads by telling you about itself as an institution — in case you were wondering, here are all our editorial departments. Quartz engages you up from with a greeting and narrative in the second person that your high school English teacher taught you never to use. As you scroll, the links appear more naturally in the text, underscoring the idea that this was written by a human rather than a cut-and-paste of headlines. And it follows its own reporting with “Five links elsewhere that made us smarter.”

    [tweetable hashtags=”#mobile”]Email isn’t dead. If anything, millennials are more plugged into email than ever[/tweetable] via savvy services like the Skimm or PolicyMic or even Upworthy. What’s different is the content strategy — the best email newsletters engage you early, can be read easily on mobile in an elevator or a Starbucks line, and have a voice that keeps you opening them, day after day.

  • How to irk an employee via enterprise email

    How to irk an employee via enterprise email

    icon_emailA friend of mine recently switched jobs to join a large company. He completed all the typical first-day HR orientation activities, and after lunch received his new email address. The address took the first seven letters of his last name, Kraftman, and dutifully appended the first letter of his first name, A — to create an email address: “kraftmaa@company.com”.

    Needless to say, he was frustrated. Most humans will read that email address as a typo, even if they know his full name. But despite numerous calls, IT wouldn’t budge — he’s stuck with it for the foreseeable future. Which made me think about the role of rigid enterprise email conventions in a digital free-for-all world.

    Since the 1990s when enterprise email first came into widespread use, IT organizations began to standardize conventions for the local parts, the name section that appears before the @ symbol and the closing domain part. Webmasters and other early adopters may have sneaked in their own clever short names and the CEO likely got to choose, but your average employee received a standard formula like:

    • first_last@company.com
    • first.last@company.com
    • firstinitiallast@company.com

    The idea behind the convention was clearly to create a predictable system: easy for IT to implement and easy for external people to infer. But as the consumerization of IT took hold, by 2009 people’s work email became for many the least sophisticated thing they did on the internet instead of the most. IT constraints start to chafe when you are arriving in the workplace with a fully-formed online identity, and your email address conflicts with the ways you are already known.

    Here’s an example. Let’s say your passport reads Mary Evans Schafler, but from birth you’ve gone by Molly. So you’ve snagged facebook.com/mollyschafler, @mollyschafler on Twitter, mollyschafler on Instagram, and linkedin.com/in/mollyschafler — and then you arrive in your new job. Suddenly, you’re mary_schafler@company.com. This new handle is not so easy for others to infer — and just think of all the Michaels who are Mikes, the Jameses who are Jims, and the Eduardos who are Eddies. Even if your enterprise-issue email address doesn’t look like a typo like unfortunate kraftmaa@company.com, you can end up with an identity that’s not a fit.

    What’s the answer? IT doesn’t want the complexity of managing multiple conventions, and there’s something to be said for the neatness of one-size-fits-all data. And you could argue most people type an email address only once, after which the magic of Gmail or Outlook kicks in and the address becomes a contact. But as more millennials enter the enterprise, employees may feel strongly about having an email identity that jibes with their already ubiquitous online self. Think of it like having your name on your business cards — not a lot of companies will insist that a Christopher use his full name instead of Chris.

    With mobile technology, enterprise employees voted with their feet. Employees brought in handhelds and tablets to thwart firewalls and perform work-related transactions until programs like bring-your-own-device (BYOD) emerged. I wonder if email will be the same: eager to retain employee communication, companies may flex to allow employees to choose their own username — just as they do everywhere else on the web.

    Photo credit: AJC1

  • Email: definitely not dead yet

    Email: definitely not dead yet

    email iconIn 2011, email was not long for this world according to virtually all the tech headline writers out there. Three recent events are reminders that there’s still a lot of opportunity inherent to highly-measurable, easily-adjustable content delivered to you anywhere on your mobile device.

    Earlier this summer, Wired reminded us not to dismiss email given all the data-driven insight it provided to the Obama campaign:

    Some Tech staffers had dismissed email as old-fashioned and uncool, without understanding how indispensable it would be in saving the campaign.

    Last week, the New York Times realized that boomers are still heavy email users (and valuable consumers for their advertisers):

    We’re pleased to announce that starting on Tuesday, Aug. 6, Booming will publish a weekly e-mail newsletter. This means you won’t have to go looking for us — we’ll find you.

    And it’s not just the old media stalwarts. Quartz announced this weekend that it’s expanding its daily brief to include a weekend edition.

    When we tried out a weekend version of the Daily Brief a while back, the response was enthusiastic. So from today we’ll be in your inbox each Saturday morning too, with some thoughts on the week’s big themes and the best writing we’ve seen on Quartz and around the web. Please give us your feedback, as always, by replying to this email. We hope you enjoy it.

     

    Photo credit: greggoconnell

  • Try it: Visualize your gmail network

    immersion graph of gmailUse gmail? You might want to try MIT Media Lab’s immersion, a terrific service that maps your email correspondence through metadata and provides you with a clear view of your email networks and correspondence habits over time. The colored clusters above reveal my own family, friend, and colleague configurations over 8.5 years of gmail use. You can segment by time period, which lets you juxtapose your shifting networks with personal or professional events like a wedding or a job change. Sliders allow you to increase or reduce the number of nodes or links among them viewed. You can choose to view or hide the node display names — I’ve chosen to hide them here to protect the innocent.

    node network chartA drill down feature allows you to see your network from the perspective of a single node. In this case I have singled out Melyssa Plunkett-Gomez (the orange dot in the middle), a former colleague from Crimson Hexagon and now a friend. The lines radiate out from Melyssa to individuals in colored network clusters, which are identified by the frequency of correspondence among the group. The width of the line indicates frequency of the messages.

    Sidebar content quantifies our mutual correspondence statscorrespondence back and forth over the years, and it’s easy to see the volume peak during our time as colleagues. A section not shown here shows who introduced us to each other  (no one — that transaction occurred in Facebook, not gmail), and lists the people Melyssa has introduced me to over the years.

    This post skims the surface of a complex and illuminating tool. The death of email continues to be predicted, but it seems inevitable that the way we manage it have to get better. Analyzing the metadata to reveal and understand the networks and patterns in our correspondence is an intriguing first step.

  • Friday 5 – 06.14.2013

    Every Friday, find five quick links about compelling technologies, emerging trends, and interesting ideas. Source: the internet.

    1. Twitter quietly opened its analytics platform for general use. Now even small publishers can view and track follows, unfollows, and clicks to gauge performance of an account, and even download a CSV.
    2. Facebook embraced the hashtag. This development has been greeted by many as the ultimate victory of advertisers over users. I agree with this Atlantic piece —  the pound sign doesn’t signal the apocalypse as much as a desire to engage users more through search and organized conversations and, yes, help those advertisers.
    3. It can be tempting to rush to new technologies to pursue the grail rather than optimize what you have. This book excerpt details how the Obama campaign enjoyed success by optimizing a technology people love to declare dead — and by overcoming a dread of being annoying.
    4. Kids like the handhelds and grownups like the tablets, according to Pew. Tablets  skew toward higher household incomes and educational attainment, but apparently there’s no significant difference in tablet ownership between men and women, or among different racial or ethnic groups.
    5. Did you think it was only your preteen obsessed with Snapchat? Apparently it’s the summer of Snapchat for Wall Street bankers as well. Looks like the startup may have a shot at being worth the 100M round it’s rumored to be raising on a half-billion or so valuation.

  • Friday 5 – 06.07.2013

    Every Friday, find five quick links about compelling technologies, emerging trends, and interesting ideas. Source: the internet.

    1. Despite the oft-declared demise of RSS, many recoiled at the announcement of a Google Reader shutdown in July. Feedly, Pulse, and others have picked up migrating users, but Digg has an upcoming launch of a social news site / RSS reader said to be uncluttered and functional. Here’s an interesting interview with the team.
    2. In case Mary Meeker hasn’t convinced you, mobile behaviors continue to indicate that there’s a lot more upside ready to be monetized. YouTube announced that its mobile ad revenue has tripled, and revealed that 40% of U.S. video views are on mobile.
    3. HBR offers an elegant envisioning of the state of email — which is not dead, but evolving. Each year workers spend the equivalent of 111 workdays dealing with the frustrations of email, and its clunky utility is not going away anytime soon.
    4. Similarly, calendar functionality feels like it could get a lot better. Sunrise launched back in early 2013 to reimagine calendar via lush design and smarter data sources —  here’s hoping its new 2.2M round will continue to advance the product.
    5. Personal security is a headache. The system of requiring human brains to come up and remember ever more human-unreadable passwords is unsustainable. Looking for a better way? David Pogue offers a comprehensive review of Dashlane as one solution.

  • Prepare for your digital afterlife

    inactive account screenshot100% of the people who read this post will die. As will 100% of the people who have accounts with Google. And Google’s finally doing something about it with the launch of Inactive Account Manager, an awkwardly-named but sensible service for deciding what to do with your digital legacy. I’ve written about death in the social era before and the need for social web services to develop new protocols for the decease; as personal online data accumulates, the need is ever greater.

    Google has created a straightforward step-by-step process: select what “inactive” should mean for your account; verify your mobile phone number; and select the data (email, contacts, photos, etc.) you’d like to share with a designated recipient; or, delete your account entirely.

    I did pause at the hardest screen of all: a blank email to complete to your digital heir. We don’t often take the time to consider or have the opportunity to craft our last words in pixels. What subject line is appropriate from the afterlife? What’s the optimal email length from a deceased sender? Save some time for this; that email message was short, but took far longer to write than I ever imagined.

  • Email is dead; long live email

    Email is the Rasputin of digital behaviors. 2011 saw a peak in the “email is dead” theme; people complain incessantly about email deluge and time spent in the dreaded inbox; and teens are resisting it (although they’re spending more time online via mobile). Good articles abound about how to fend off email and manage it. And yet, nothing has taken its place: services like Yammer don’t seem to have found the social substitute, and layoffs are beginning.

    The lingering existence of email was summarized neatly yesterday in TNW — email just works, and has a low barrier to entry. People are still finding innovative ways to cut through the inbox clutter and deliver results. And Mailbox, which has taken about a million and a half reservations, is exploring new ways to advance mobile email into productivity (and was promptly snapped up by Dropbox).

    In a fast moving digital environment, it’s frustrating to think that a highly imperfect and widely derided application around for nearly two decades is still where we should be sinking time and effort. But ignore email at your peril — it’s still bread-and-butter for most digital initiatives.

  • How to manage your information diet

    information cloudIt’s beyond a truism that we live in an age of information overload. Email is overwhelming, connection is ubiquitous with most of us tethered to one or more mobile devices, and it feels like a new, must-see social web service emerges every day.

    Unless you’re a full-time social media specialist, there’s a lot more to your job than listening and posting on social channels. Apart from email, there are hours of meetings, and one would hope, some time carved out each day for focused work. So, how do you put yourself on an information diet that gives you what you need to survive and grow, but lets you stay productive?

    There are smart applications and tip-filled websites that will help you determine your own recipe for success, but here’s mine:

    • Start the day with filtered RSS feeds. Google Reader is a terrific service (although rumors of its demise persist). I keep a short list of feeds that are germane to my role and my interests, and prune the kudzu of sites I feel I ought to read frequently and mercilessly. A small number of recipes in IFTTT surface content to me more aggressively, like a favorite blogger’s posts as text message.
    • Schedule some of your social publishing. Now that you have great feed content, how do you share it? I mostly use Buffer to post; colleagues swear by Hootsuite or Tweetdeck. Scheduling enables sharing of relevant or interesting content throughout the day, but doesn’t replace listening and live interaction.
    • Use old-school Google alerts. Google Alerts is an undersung technology that still delivers a lot of value. Create terms that are tight enough a filter for only the truly relevant to slip through, and prioritize terms by importance (as it happens, daily digest, and weekly digest). Newsle is a great service for following real news about people in your social networks.
    • Select smart people as human filters. As digital moves into the C-suite, a lot of hedgehogs have to become foxes—moving away from an understanding of one big thing to represent a breadth of strategy, content, marketing, and technical knowledge. Topics I am fascinated by but rely on the deep expertise of others on the social web include: data science, information visualization, responsive design, and time management. Learn from others—and use social to connect and thank.
    • Hold 60 minute blocks for working where you don’t check email. Interrupted time is less productive time, but being realistic about small enough chunks to safeguard is what enables some focused work. I leave my phone facing up, and mark only a few folks for the VIP inbox on iPhone and iPad—if there’s a critical message I can see and address it, but no other noise breaks through.
    • Between meetings, read, act on, and delete email. This is easier said than done—but if the approach is to read it and get rid of it, it keeps the 1500+ received a day from overloading the system. When something becomes a task, move it to a productivity tool where it stacks up against your own priorities, not just the inbox-driven ones.
    • Find the right productivity tool. I’ve written about and tried a range of productivity apps supporting granular tasks and life goals, but Evernote, I just can’t quit you.  Task lists, document sharing, web clipper, IFTTT integration, audio, and Skitch make this indispensable. I was slow getting the app on my iPhone, and the recent addition has made even hallway conversations more productive.
    • Perhaps the biggest time saver/information management idea is a surprising one: carve out time every week to listen to colleagues and schedule regular 1:1 meetings, even if they are 15 minutes long. Try to put down the device and really listen. What’s your colleagues’ critical path? How can you help? How might you inadvertently be under-communicating or worse, hindering progress? Scheduling time in-person reduces email follow up, and builds the kind of understanding and connection essential for getting things done.
    [tweetable]Every knowledge worker with strategic projects, exploding inboxes, and looming deadlines can relate the the pain of the deluge of information.[/tweetable] These are my ways to wade in without drowning—what are yours?