A colleague of mine was bemoaning the fact that despite the fact he had blogged on a particular topic, an internal Gartner email thread sprung up on the same topic instead of in the comments on his post. This despite the fact that he sent an email to the thread mentioning the post. But all he said in his email to the thread was “I have posted on the topic.” This is the advice I gave him:
What you should have said in your email was:
STOP! DO NOT POST ANOTHER EMAIL IN THIS THREAD!
Instead, click on this link: ?URL?
And post your comment there.
Thank you.
We all know the inertia of human nature. To counter it you have to
- Hit people with a 2×4 to get their attention (like the above email)
- Make it like falling off a log for them to do the new thing (providing them the link to the specific post)
Any other ideas for shifting an internal email thread to an external blog thread?
9 responses so far ↓
1 Thomas Otter // Jan 16, 2009 at 2:51 am
Nick,
There is a feature in workpress for posting via email
http://codex.wordpress.org/Blog_by_Email
This doesn’t do what you want, but I would think it would be relatively easy to create a post email as comment feature. It requires some developers who would like to scratch this particular itch.
2 Dan Sholler // Jan 16, 2009 at 10:01 am
The problem is not with email, nor is the problem mechanical ( I am sure someone could implement the feature Thomas suggested, although the spam possibilities are pretty frightening.. )
The real issue is the mismatch in expectations between the medium and the audience. I remember back in my childhood (well, OK, I was not quite a child) there were organizations that had 2 different email systems, one for internal communication and one for external (internet). While to some extent this was a transition phase, it also allowed people to identify the medium with the audience. If I was using the internal system, I knew that only my colleagues at work would ever hear what I had to say. If I used the external system, I was a lot more circumspect because even though it was email, and I was in control of the destinations, it still was public.
The problem that Nick refers to here is a problem of community. It is perfectly reasonable, and sometimes appropriate for me to comment privately on something that was said publicly. The notions of private and public are not absolute, but reflect my understanding of the community which will “hear” my comment. So when someone you work with says something on a blog, it may be reasonable to comment on that in the corporate email system, since the community who can “hear” you in email is presumably different than that on the blog.
The real challenge is that those communities are not granular enough, and we cannot change our minds once we say something. I am sure many reader’s mothers’ told them “least said, soonest mended” or some other aphorism reminding us that words cannot be taken back. Yet in a store and forward world, the expectation is that they can, or that at least they can be out of date and superseded by other words. This leads to a conflict. On the one hand, I want to be able to tailor my words to exactly who they are meant for, and make sure that they are the only ones who hear them, and in other cases I do not care who hears me.
In places where the boundaries of the community are known and understood by the participants, there is much more “public” commentary (i.e. a culture of doing things like posting on blogs). In places where the boundaries of the community are not well known, then there is less. People talk with others who are part of their community. I am guessing that in many cases the reason the conversation takes place in email, not in the blogs is because composition of the email community is understood by the sender.
3 Anthony Bradley // Jan 16, 2009 at 10:21 am
Nick and Dan are dead wrong here! OK, I’m being dramatic. I’ll correct myself. They are mostly wrong. Let me start with Dan. This is more a culture than a community thing. The email responses in the thread Nick refers to were definitely perfect for a public venue and would have added significant value to the blog post. Nothing in there was paricularly controversial, flippant, or half-baked. I would bet a paycheck that the responders would not say they were concerned about exposing that information to the public. It was a matter of culture and ease not community (Thomas’ point on email integration is pertinent here).
On to Nick. Nick, if only it were that easy. I have done that email instruction in the past as have others only to see the thread continue in email as if the missive plea never existed. Instead of killing the email beast we continue to overfeed it. I will work on a more concerted and collaborative effort to at least wound the beast.
Keep an eye on my blog for the results
4 Nick Gall // Jan 16, 2009 at 10:50 am
“It was a matter of culture and ease.”
Agreed. But that’s what I was saying in my original post — what are the best practices for nudging the “inertia of human nature” in new directions? Simply mentioning the new approach, eg “hey guys I posted on this subject in my blog”, is not enough.
You have to impede the old behavior (my “STOP! DO NOT EMAIL” message”), incent the new behavior (open to ideas on incentives for blog commenting instead of email replying), and maximize the ease of the new approach.
Agreed? In any case I’m looking forward to the results on your blog Anthony.
5 Nick Gall // Jan 16, 2009 at 4:10 pm
Thomas,
“I would think it would be relatively easy to create a post email as comment feature. It requires some developers who would like to scratch this particular itch.”
It turns out at least one blog platform has it built in: posterous.com! It is a pretty cool blogging platform I just learned about via Guy Kawasaki’s blog.
It not only enables you to email your posts, but it also enables you to create an email address for comments. By cc’ing such an email address in your email to an existing thread, everyone’s replies would become comments to a post.
I’m playing around a bit with it now. See ironick.posterous.com.
6 Laurence Faux // Jan 23, 2009 at 10:24 am
I don’t think people differentiate between email and blog comment too much – I believe they think they’re just talking about stuff via a keyboard and mouse etc. – in simple terms they may not appreciate the difference to create a more permanent record – Plus I think they might tend to feel as though their ideas or conversations are being stolen or userped in some way…..how would you feel if you were standing in the street talking to your friends and someone came along and told you to stop because “We’ve already agreed the outcome of your conversation….here look at this blog”….I imagine you’d ignore the person and continue….I suppose its about not invalidating peoples contribution to society and feeling like we make a unique contribution.
So what’s the answer….I wonder if email trails can be some how identified and preserved as side discussions to a topic ( in the same way as folks who chat during a slide show) They are still in control of their conversation but somehow there side discussion conclusions may all be able to contribute to a drawn together common understanding.
7 Nick Gall // Jan 23, 2009 at 11:22 am
Laurence, “I wonder if email trails can be some how identified and preserved as side discussions to a topic.” I suppose that’s what list servers and Usenet groups are for. Some list server and Usenet emails threads go back to the early 1980s and are still available on the web. Here’s a link to the Common Lisp mailing list with an email from me (ngall) dated 1986: http://www.saildart.org/prog/SYS/ERR_SYS/.html/000391?390,312105 ! Talk about a permanent record — 20+ years. Thanks for prompting me to look this up.
8 Frank Hood // Feb 2, 2009 at 6:20 pm
Nick,
We’re dealing with that transition right now, and poorly so far. We have a long tradition of email forums in my company where people post questions or items of interest to a group. We’ve recently started to move to a more formal blogging and wiki set-up while coexisting with the current email forums.
We already have an Outlook macro that the author can use to prevent a reply all, but it’s not required. Now whenever a post is made to an email forum, a request to not reply all is made with the request to post on a forum with the link to that forum. Unfortunately because the request is automatically generated (and the software is still in alpha), the link is to the general forum and not the specific post, so you have to hunt for the post itself.
Posterous.com sounds like an interesting solution. I think the real solution would be to force the “reply all” button to send the comment to the forum. Of course you’d have to strip the included original text from the response. Most people recognize that as useful in email at least until the thread gets too long, but it’s totally redundant in a blog or wiki.
9 Tony Law // Feb 3, 2009 at 7:35 am
Nick – This has been an issue for as long as there have been alternative channels. One technique that works is to copy the email into the blog (conferencing forum, Notes database, …) and reply there. Then you reply by email (reply-to-all, if need be) saying “I’ve moved this into the blog, and replied there: click here …”. They do have to go to the forum to see your reply. But you have to manually create and include the link.
In my experience, it works about half the time!
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