For some time now people have asked if people will get overwealmed by their e-mail. Personal messages, work documents, shopping confirmation, newsletters, promotions — they all are coming to a single mailbox and leaving us all glued to our inboxes trying desperately to manage the deluge of information like computer scientists or Dewey Decimal librarians with folders, tags, labels and the like.

An alternative is to imagine a segmentation of e-mail into different applications — Facebook for personal, work on the company system (most likely an installed e-mail client), purchases to a banking tool, news to RSS readers. They can all send notifications to a primary e-mail address, but by being specialised they offer more functionality to keep us all sane.

Consider the report just published by Hitwise about traffic figures from last year in the UK. Basically it calls out that social networks are getting more traffic in terms of % of total visits then webmail sites.

Of course there is more to do on Facebook then hotmail, but if hotmail is primarily used for talking to friends, it isn’t hard to envision it becoming the primary e-mail address and hotmail dropping off even more.

As people take to communicating more, it gets to be too much for an e-mail client — rapid fire chats are better managed in IM, general comments to the world in wall posts, group party invites through e-vites.

Computers are here to make our lives easier — specialisation of communication tools will be a great first step.

Some other great social networking stats from an FT article, Business Woo Social Network Figures, 15 Jan 2008:

• 14,000 people signed a Facebook petition to bring back the Wispa bar for Cadbury’s
• The Primark Appreciation Society has 100,000 members and receives gentle guidance from the retailer’s marketing team.
• Screwfix.com, a retailers site, has an electricians forum with over 300,000 messages on it.

And of course last years favourite also from Hitwise siting that Topshop and ASOS receive more referrals from MySpace then MSN Search and Yahoo Search combined.  The figure was 5% of their traffic at the time in March 2007.

Throughout agencyland everyone is talking about what replaces the 30-second spot and standard print advertising to build awareness for brands, and for many marketers it is events and "experiential installations."

While it is difficult to reach 2 million people with a festival, Innocent managed to get 120,000 people to attend its 2006 event in Regents Park, and if you consider only 10:1 people seeing press articles, interacting with online sites or simply hearing about it through friends you are quickly 1.2 million without counting any media used to promote the event.

Clearly the goal is to leverage the event and maximize the buzz or amount people talk about them.

One great technique is to use technology and there are a host of great new tools being made available. Microsoft Surface has gotten a lot of attention but it is only the beginning. Consider what HP have done for the WSJ D5 conference or what the entrepreneurs at i-bar are proposing.

It doesn't take much extrapolation to see every festival, airport and trainstation having a line of interactive walls for people to play with — and in the process learn about a new product or service.

How will they work? Gesture computing and intuitive interfaces … we hope.

Take a look at Perceptive Pixels vision on YouTube below.

I’ve always been impressed by the information that Dave Balter and the team at BzzAgent share through their BeeLog.

It makes sense — no confidentiality is broken and it allows people that are evaluating the company (clients, potential employees, partners) to educate themselves about their business and be smarter when working with the company. It also broadens the number of people that can give their input into what the company is doing — input which generally makes the company smarter.

It also a great tool for management — a forum for instant public recognition. Whether putting someone’s “name up in lights,” or “naming and shaming,” a company blog is a sort of a light-weight version of the more traditional atomic bomb, the press release.

Here is a great example BzzAgent did thinking about how they are working with their advisory board.

Basically the team at BzzAgent inserted a joke slide in their advisory board presentation entitled “Investor / Advisor Litigation Update.” Clearly a title that should get peoples’ attention. And of course under half noticed the slide or commented on it in their feedback to the company.

It is the bane of the world we’ve created that no one has time (or being busy has become fashionable?) and that business people don’t read, they only scan. Pretty soon we’ll need comment buttons on the bottom of e-mails and powerpoint presentations where people can indicate they actually reviewed them.

Advisors Advising

Posted by Dave Balter

August 21st, 2007

Since early 2003, BzzAgent has had an Advisory Board.

In the early days, before we had an official Corporate Board, we met a few times and we worked with a number of individuals to help us with specific projects such as patenting our WOM process and the best approach to certain partnerships. But as the company accelerated, and we’ve added board members, executives and staff, it’s been immensely difficult to utilize this group of experts. Individually, each would gladly help if we reached out, but as a whole this cluster is relatively distant. [more]

They say blogs are all about the blogger — and in fact sometimes it is true.

Teams been talked to, clients notified, internal announcements made and the press release sent out. And of course George got it out on his blog, as you’d expect from a fully entrenched digital maniac.

If you are interested the articles that are online are here:

  Iris raids Ogilvy for digital chief Baker

  OgilvyOne’s John Baker Heads to Iris

Personally I’m really looking forward to the entrepreneurial kick of building up a group and helping an independent agency grow. Being on the MTeam at Organic (or BigWigz as it was also once called) was some of the most interesting and fun work I’ve seen. Big enough to have scale (and even go public amazingly), small enough to still make calls and move on them.

Ogilvy is a great company and OgilvyInteractive will have a great year — particularly in London. We’ve built the base with a lot of clients, done great work and hired lots of really talented people.

It is a tough decision choosing between moving a big company that is at the top of its game, gets digital marketing and does move — all be it at times slowly — or a small company that has a seriously entrepreneurial attitude, great approach to people and is growing like mad on the back of great work. Or perhaps I should actually just thank the Internet for the choices. Who would have thought the Mini-Tel could turn into this.

Since it is now all about Iris, I thought I’d pull out some background on the place. High growth, good work, people focused, independent and ambitious. It is a nice mix.

Agency of the Year 2007: Direct Agency of the Year – Best of the rest

Marketing 12-Dec-07

Hours of painstaking deliberation could not help the judges separate the joint runners-up for the Direct Agency of the Year award – Iris and Partners Andrews Aldridge.

ability to deliver on mail briefs, with other business units offering
expertise on sales promotion, sports sponsorship and experiential
marketing campaigns.Iris is now the global sponsorship agency for ING, lead global digital
agency for Shell, a digital roster agency for Coca-Cola, and was hired
by Southern Comfort for an EMEA brief. It also won promotional briefs to
support Unilever’s Sure, Lynx and Vaseline brands, as well as UK direct
marketing business for Gala Bingo.

Iris has been recruiting to accommodate this increase in business. The
most high-profile appointment came in May, with the arrival of former
British Airways finance director Drew Thompson as chairman. The agency
also poached Archibald Ingall Stretton’s Alistair Bryan and WWAV Rapp
Collins’ Paul Beier.

Green issues have continued to rise up the corporate agenda, and the
selected agencies were asked to provide evidence of their own
environmental credentials.

In March, Iris took part in ‘Lights out London’, which saw the agency
cut its energy consumption by 30%. It also runs recycling initiatives
and a ‘bike to work’ scheme, among other programmes.