Monday, December 05, 2011

A Big Switch from Email to Social Media Platforms

Atos is a huge French company that just recently banned the use of email within the company, which is a huge bold move. They decided to only use social media “Facebook-like” platforms instead for basic communication since they believe that email is a waste of time! An article on Business Insider by Henry Blodget discusses this incident in detail. Blodget wrote “Susanna Kim of ABC reports:


CEO Thierry Breton of the French information technology company said only 10 percent of the 200 messages employees receive per day are useful and 18 percent is spam. That’s why he hopes the company can eradicate internal emails in 18 months, forcing the company’s 74,000 employees to communicate with each other via instant messaging and a Facebook-style interface. Caroline Crouch, a spokeswoman for the company, told ABC News the goal is focused on internal emails rather than external emails with clients and partners. Atos has already reduced the number of internal emails by 20 percent in six months. When asked how employees have responded to the policy, Crouch told ABC News the overall response “has been positive with strong take up of alternative tools.”


Chatter of Salesforce.com is one of those “Facebook-like” platforms that companies are interested in. In the last super bowl ad, they showed the Black Eyed Peas and what they can do in 15 seconds or less. They showed how they are more productive without email. Chatter is best described as a hybrid of Facebook, tweeter, instant messaging, and NetMeeting to allow people to collaborate in the cloud, ties directly to your CRM system so that data like reports and deals won can speak to you and give you updates. The real question is: Can we do away with email? My personal thought is: probably not yet. The French company Atos is gradually working towards that in 18 months. If we look at the big picture even salesforce.com that created Chatter still needs email. Facebook and chatter both offer email like services that allow private messages so how is that different from email? Not really different, but embracing social media is the next step and big email providers like Microsoft, Google, and Yahoo need to be aware of this kind of corporate shift.


Article Source: http://www.businessinsider.com/company-bans-email-2011-12

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