July 4, 2008

Is Email Keeping You Down. An IBMer Skips Email for Social Tools

Email is nice, but then again, it becomes not so nice when your email box is completely flooded with emails and you feel you are loosing or have lost control.

Luis Suarez, social computing evangelist for IBM stopped using so much email earlier this year and the benefits have reaped some surprisingly good results for him and those he communicates with.

I.B.M. uses a Facebook-like site called Beehive and a personalized internal directory called Profiles. These help build trust levels with peers in order to get a job done much faster, and they easily locate experts in a particular subject. I share and update big files with a file sharing system that cuts down on the back-and-forth of sending big presentations and video files.

Say someone asks to view a presentation you have done recently, and you decide to share it via an open “file sharing” space. Then, before you know it, strangers thank you for sharing that presentation, which they will be reusing themselves within their own projects. That kind of immediate impact would be unlikely through e-mail.

Read the full NY Times article here.

tags: email , ibm , social media | 0 comments