Email Bankruptcy Counseling is Now in Session.

You’ve probably heard the term email bankruptcy, or can at least infer what I’m talking about here if you’re opening up Outlook and greeted by a glaring “Inbox (24,576)”. If you’re feeling consumed by email, bankruptcy counseling is in session. Hopefully this post is a no-nonsense quick and dirty guide to managing the unmanageable at work. These are strategies I’m starting to adopt to keep the inbox svelte and keep myself productive at work, and as such the following tips are mostly work email related. You’ll note the focus on prevention, since the old “an ounce of prevention” is horribly cliche, but still pretty dead on.

- Cut the acknowledgements. Alot of occupational spam involves replies people send to be polite or acknowledge messages. If you’re getting replies with “Great!” or “Received your email, thanks!”, cut that off at the source. Simply drop in a little footer in your emails stating “No need to respond unless there’s an issue with this. Extend the same courtesy to your busy colleagues.

- Don’t dump info@yourdomain.com into your inbox. Spammers usually mine domains and blast out emails to the “info@” address. If you must monitor a general inbox, use something less common like questions@yourdomain.com.

- Don’t use email! Use Wikis. At Socialtext, our email traffic blasted out to groups is light mostly because most of the conversations are on our wiki. If you’re looking to roll one out in your business and want to get informed on the how-tos, email me (oh the irony!). (Update: another dopey cliche: a picture is worth 1,000. Here’s a visual from the wikinomics blog:)

- Read up on “Inbox Zero“. The basic idea here is that each email you receive should trigger an immediate action – either you respond to it, you act on it, you delete it and forget it, or you forward it to the appropriate person. There’s no reason to leave things lingering around. The emphasis here is on dealing with an email immediately once you take the time to read it, rather than flagging it for follow up later and allowing the emails to stack up.

- Read email only twice a day – Tim Ferris suggests communicating expectations that emails will be read and responded to twice a day, and answered immediately once you do sit down to read them. He also suggests setting an auto-responder to set expections, and provides the following sample message:

Thank you for your email! Due to my current workload I am only checking email at 11am and 4pm. If you need anything immediately please call me on my cell so that I can address this important matter with you. Thank you and have a great day!

-Tom

I’m with Tim on this for the most part, although I think a footer on your emails stating the above is preferable to auto email-bombing your unsuspecting colleagues.

This is just a sampling of solutions to leveraging your time more effectively. If you have other email hacks you’d like to share, please share ‘em below!

The First Tweetup

Lucky for me the first Tweetup in the bay area happened to be a few blocks from our offices at Socialtext, so I picked up Ling ling and we headed on over to meet fellow tweeters. My thanks to Ryan and Jennifer for kicking it off. Here’s what it looked like after the drinking got started (click the pic to pull up more):

The Tweeters are, from left to right, Martin, Ling ling, Rachel Luxemburg, me, Ryan Kuder, Mukund Mohan, Jennifer Leggio, and Joel Postman. Chris Abad and Leora Zellman also came from a drink and a gab after the above pic was taken.

We mostly had a laugh about some of the recent Twitterdrama as well as how each of us came to get onto Twitter. There’s always a learning or two to take away – Here’s my three takeaways:

1. Twitter turns the acquaintance process on its head. Normally we meet people, exchange pleasantries and start to form relationships based on shared interested. With tweetups, you go in with predefined “tags” for many people you meet. I realize that sounds impersonal, but there is also the benefit of skipping the lowest common denominator conversations (just to be polite) and heading right for conversations both you and the other person find interesting. For life hacks types of people, this is awesome.

2. Tweetups fill the gaps. Like Mukund, I wondered why despite the efficiency of many to many scalable communication, we still meet in person. I think we are programmed to communicate as much via visual queues as we do with words (these are of course missing in Twitter). Hence face to face meetings “complete the picture”. There’s also the serendipity of meeting someone you likely wouldn’t have friended otherwise.

3. Open conversations inhibit more open conversations? Everyone there is well aware that tweets aren’t private, and thus felt free to throw around some good natured jabs at widely known bloggers and tweeters. In other words, they felt more free to share their opinions in a way they never would on Twitter.

Bloggers Raising Money: Smart or Shortsighted?

There’s a wave of blog fundings going on, and with any new infusing of capital comes an infusion of discussion, rants, and general grab-assing. Here’s a quick summary plus the take of one guy (me) who was in the eye of the storm during the previous silicon valley funding bubble.

In 2006, a few blogging-as-a-business setups were out hunting for growth capital, but we were looking at a mere trickle of funding. That all changed in 2007: GigaOm took in a cool million, Xconomy and BlogHer funded at $3.5 million, and both Sugar and The Huffington Post hooked up $10 million a piece. Quick math – that’s almost $30 million there, and presumably since VCs are usually looking to cash in a 10x payout, that would place their expectations at $300 million.  For comparison’s sake, the venerable NY Times is sitting at about a 2.8 billion market cap.

Mike Arrington’s contention is that the blogosphere is more like a grade school playground where fist fights break out all the time, and he contends that blogs need to grow up. Oh, and the blogosphere is an ecosystem dependent on small and mid size players, and that the big blog funding will suck up all the talent, screwing up the ecosystem. Hence the “A list” should consolidate and take on the likes of Cnet. “Phooey” says Robert Scoble – no great accomplishment ever started with a mission statement stating “crush the other guy” (btw: note to Robert – we did in fact race to the moon to beat the Soviets, hence the term “space race”).

It makes sense to have content creators rise to the top, while ranters throwing stones in response to long forgotten insults sideline themselves, for sure. Here’s a pragmatic question though: who’s going to unite the dream team Mike? Did you have a specific blog in mind? Hmm. Anyway, who would subrogate their ego and become a cog in the 250? Unless there is a dearth of money and eyeballs, most of these bloggers will want to roll their own. It’s just like any other growth industry – a shakeout usually happens when the market potential comes close to “ripe”. Read between the lines, intrepid reader.

As for the blog ecosystem, the hope is that we’ll benefit from the infusion of new bloggers to link early and link often to counter the “giant sucking sound” as the brightest get bought up by the machine. I believe this will happen since blog adoption is likely to keep growing fast, but of course time will tell. The other point seems to be that most of these blogs will not live up to VC-optimistic revenue expectations, but come on – we know that’s by design. VCs are often lucky to have 1 in 10 investments become wildly successful and plan accordingly. Eventually rolling up many of the successful blogs into one or two big mega networks is eventually the endgame and VC involvement makes things pricey for the roller-upper. That’s the real rant.

Social Media Adoption – The BONG framework

A recruiter friend of mine getting into the social network and social media scene asked me what’s driving the uptake. There are a number of terrific blogs out there cheerleading the social media movement which have looked into this, and of note particularly is Marshall Kirkpatrick’s thoughtful post on common objections to social media adoption. Like Marshall, I’m not convinced persuading anyone to join the party is a fruitful exercise.

However, I do think watching out for conditions which may lead someone to adopt social media tools and spurring on adoption is helpful. I’m taking a queue here from Sun Tzu’s classic treatise – creating conditions for victory is imposible, but taking advantage of conditions for victory which present themselves leads to success. Watch out for these needs if you want an opportunity to introduce someone to social media tools, and carpe diem.

I’d argue people join social media to do one of four things:

Belong to a Group – Maybe your friends all joined myspace, so you did also. Maybe you joined Twitter to connect with people with the same interests, or perhaps because it gave you a direct line to speak asynchronously with people whose work you’ve come to value. Prime example: Facebook

Office chat/gossip participation – I’m talking about the watercooler chat effect taken online. We’re particularly primed for this kind of adoption considering all the M&A activity during the past few years, which creates coworking situations between distant geographic locations. Another driver is the rise of telecommuters. Prime example: Twitter.

Nature’s Call – This is my polite term for saying that a number of people sign on to social networks to find potential romantic parters. To put it more colloquially, people log on to get laid. It sounds funny, but I know at least two guys who signed on to Myspace and Facebook for that express reason. Prime example: Myspace.

Get a Job or Sale – Basically networking to advance one’s career objectives; to network with influencers to get hired, get a starup partner, or get a contract executed. Prime example: Linked in.

So there you have it.. the “Bong” framework. I can’t think of any drivers falling outside the four basic buckets outlined above. Can you?

Punctuated Equilibrium

Beware intrepid reader, this post, being entirely personal in nature has nothing to do with startups, web 2.0 stuff, sales, business development, or ecology. However, I hope you enjoy reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it.

I can think of no more apt title for this chronicle of the last 2-3 weeks – what a wild ride it’s been! Let’s see.. I’ve gotten married, I am no longer living solo, and I’m much happier on a personal level for it. That and my mom, who has been persistent in her appeals for grandchildren, is now seeing the light at the end of the tunnel. Sorry mom, you still have to wait. I’m not jumping into that hornet’s nest just yet.

So I’ve taken about a 3 week hiatus on the blogging, preferring instead of drip out little snippets of my trip on Twitter instead. But here’s the 411..

That’s us right there before the wedding ceremony – Ling ling looked stunning! The Chinese dont’ really have a hangup about the groom seeing the bride prior to the wedding – in fact, we hopped into a limo and rode out the wedding at Mingzhu Seaview together. The idea seems to be that weddings being more of an “coming out event” rather than a “joining event”. We stood outside the wedding hall for about an hour or so joking around with my brother Javier, welcoming guests and photo-oping with anyone within arms’ reach:

Then the organ music queues up and we walk in, while blasted with confetti and indoor fireworks. Yes, indoor.

We then lit two candles, and symbolically joined the two at the wick of a larger, heart shaped candle to kick off speaking from Ling ling’s father, my father, and finally me. It’s a guy thing, kind of like football. Her father kicked off a heartfelt “farewell” as he tearfully spoke about the past. My dad followed up with a heartfelt “welcome to America”, which I could tell was difficult for him. You see, Ling ling’s dad is a practiced public speaker, as he’s on his company’s board of directors and often is a featured speaker at company events. I’m basically fearless when it comes to public speaking. My dad however is the quiet, introvert type and isn’t used to the spotlight at all. He delivered beautifully nonetheless, as did my mom..

We then took a bow to both sets of families and exchanged rings (she almost teared up, so she started doing the whole roll-eyes-up maneuver to suck up the tears – you folks who cry at the movies know what I’m talking about). Here’s what Ling ling looked like and here’s what my mom looked like at that moment. The officiate then announced the wedding had reached its’ end, to applause from packed house of over 200 people.

Ling ling then changed into a red dress, as is customary in China (the bride goes from white dressed pre-wed to red dressed post-wed). She looked absolutely beautiful in any color as we went from person to person who congratulated us. As is typical, we toasted to each person present, which got me close to smashed by the time I was done. Boy, was it fun though.

We later went off to a studio to take a couple of shots. Here’s my favorites of the bunch:

What a rush. I’m happier than I’ve ever been, and apparently there’s something in the air as this was the first of four weddings I plan to attend this year, hence the post title. There’s usually one humourous surprise at weddings – something that doesn’t quite go according to plan. For us, it was a nonevent: we took a bow prior to the officiate announcing it. Ling ling and I could barely contain our laughter and the crowd giggled away. The only other surprise is that my prankster kid brother didn’t try to Rick Roll the festivities.

Fast forward to last weekend, here’s the blushing bride at Pier 39 in San Francisco having a little wardrobe fun..

If you’d like to see more, here’s our Shanghai and Suzhou trip pics, our full wedding set, and some glamour/cheeseball pictures with me in a funny hat.