Email Dashboard

We've been so focused on some big new initiatives at ClearContext the past few months that my blogging pace has really taken a huge hit.  I have a big backlog of topics to cover, but besides a quick Thanksgiving trip have no other travel planned for a while, so hopefully will do a better job at staying on top of them over the next few weeks.  I can't believe I still haven't blogged about exciting progress being made at IORG or about various excellent presentations and discussions from Defrag.  Soon, soon, I promise!

The first topic I want to touch on is something that actually came up a few times at Defrag.  There are so many products and companies trying to tackle issues around information overload, with new companies popping up seemingly every day – especially in the email space.  However, few of these companies actually address the issue of how much their products actually help people with the real problems they face with email.  Instead, the focus is often just on cool new features and soft benefits that almost always sound good, but often don't address the huge pain that people and companies are facing with levels of email that they simply can't keep up with.

Few companies have done a good job at identifying the real problems, providing good measurement and metrics to users, and using that information to actually help users with their problems.  I'll address those three areas briefly, but they are definitely worth going into more depth in future posts.

The problems people face with email today

This is the area that is easiest to understand, and most companies in the space focus on a similar/overlapping set of issues people face, including things like:

Getting more email than they can handle
Spending too much time dealing with email
Being unable to respond to email in a timely manner
Can't find information they need in email

There are many more issues, but you get the idea.

Measurement and metrics

Here is where things start to get shakier.  Outside of some research experiements and internal corporate projects, most people and companies don't have a good understanding of the numbers that they are dealing with.  As awareness of email and information overload problems grows, questions like these are starting to get more focus:

How many emails are people getting?
How quickly are they responding?
How many responses are they able to send?
How behind are they getting with emails piling up in their inbox?

Of course, those are just a few examples of basic metrics.

How (and how much) do products help and what should people do?

OK, so we do some measurements, and guess what – people get too many emails, get way behind on responding, and can't keep stuff organized.  So now what?   This is where things get most challenging.

To really solve the biggest problems people face dealing with information, we need to help people understand which of those measurements are the key sources of their problems and show them how they can most effectively use our products and solutions to improve their performance.  And if done right, provide them a feedback loop that actually shows them measureable results illustrating their improvement over time. 

The better an understanding all of us in this industry have about the biggest problems, key measurements, and most effective solutions, the better we'll be able to serve our customers.  So over the next few weeks I'm going to spend some time asking others involved in this area what they see as the most important points in those areas and sharing their input both here and with IORG members.

I recently wrote a post about the newest batch of email-related startups. Pete Warden has compiled a list of ten tools defining the future of email.  It's a worthwhile roundup to check out.

A little tour around the blog world today…

Gloom and Doom – or Capital Efficency writes Brad Feld about what most everyone in the startup world is writing about these days – bracing for tough economic times.  He references an excellent post Capital Efficiency Finds Its Moment by Fred Wilson that talks about doing a lot while staying lean and mean.

I’ll refrain from linking to the countless blog posts talking about how in times of economic turmoil companies should focus on reducing expenses, having necessary capital in place, and growing revenues.  Thanks for that newsflash, everyone!

Instead I’ll point you to Howard Lindzon’s great post Too Small To Fail. He applies that mantra to finance and startups, but I really think that can apply to so many people’s situation, whether as an individual, a startup company, or a team/group in a bigger company.  While huge macro-level stuff is going on around us, almost all of us can find ways to succeed in our little corner of the world if we are smart and nimble. 

Which brings me to Scoble’s post on The Enterprise Email Crisis.  Of course this is a major pain point!  Most of us are receiving 100 or more emails every day – and that’s after all the obvious spam is filtered out.  That’s hours a day of reading, processing, and responding to email.  As individuals and companies find themselves needing to do more with less, time and efficiency become even more critical. 

Instead of checking where the Dow is every five minutes seconds, I’m doing as much as possible to take advantage of the critical need for people to work more efficiently, especially when it comes to communication, collaboration, and email.  We’ve been working on measurable, tangible ways to help people be more productive with email at ClearContext for a while and have been looking even further into the future of solutions with colleagues at the Information Overload Research Group.  And oh yeah, discussing these problems with a bunch of smart people at Defrag (dh1 for reg discount if you decide to go!). A lot of things are going to slow down in these times, but innovation shouldn’t be one of them.

I’ve written a bunch in the past about email innovation and what’s coming (or needs to come) next.  Problems and opportunities around email have received a lot of attention over the past year, and along with that attention has come a new crop of startups with their own take on things.  Here are a few that have recently been announced:

Gist "[connects] your inbox to the web" allowing you to "get business-critical information about key people and companies."  They sound like a more ambitious version of Xobni – both companies pull together email and other information about each of your contacts.  If Gist is successful in combining email search with web search to provide one-stop shopping for information on people and companies, it will prove to be a very useful tool.

OtherInbox is "a free email account that automatically organizes newsletters, social
networking updates, coupons and receipts from online purchases."  We’ve focused on this area a bit with ClearContext Notification Managers with a focus on "bacn" type email.  What OtherInbox really reminds me of, though, is a very focused implementation of whitelist and challenge/response systems like Boxbe and BlueBottle.  However, by focusing on one very narrow problem area, OtherInbox is able to use a very simple organizational approach. Their big challenge is obvious – getting people to sign up for yet another email account when most people have at least one webmail account in addition to a work account, while webmail providers continue to improve their spam/bacn management capabilities.

PostBox is trying something very ambitious – a whole new email client.  I’m sure PostBox has a lot more planned, but right now it seems a little underwhelming from the preview screenshots and descriptions.  Not a whole lot we haven’t seen already from existing clients and plugins.  A key feature of theirs is an attachment viewer that looks similar to what Xoopit does for GMail and we do in the ClearContext Attachment Explorer.  They also talk about web integration and organization around topics, things that Zenbe is trying to tackle with a new webmail platform.

So, a lot of evolutionary here, and not so much revolutionary.  Of this new batch of companies, I’m probably most interested in seeing what Gist does.  If they can succesfully create an automated filtrbox type service driven from my email, it’s definitely something that will be quite useful to me.

For discussion on more revolutionary approaches, come join us at the Fixing Foundational Information Channels session at Defrag (code dh1 gets you a reg discount btw).  And check out ClearContext later this week for our own take on where email is headed!

CRN reported that a recent Marshal poll showed 29% of their sample bought something from a spam email.  I’m skeptical of that number, but whatever, spam and more respectable direct email marketing aren’t going away anytime soon. 

The DMA Email Marketing Blog recently posted pondering the impact artificial intelligence and related technologies in email will have on e-mail marketing.  They reference two Outlook plugins that are giving users new ways to look at their email, Xobni and my company, ClearContext.

I think that there’s a big opportunity for next-generation email apps to not only help get rid of unwanted email marketing, but to also help highlight email marketing messages that are relevant and wanted.  ClearContext is not the only one interested in email prioritization, though we have some of the deepest experience and best understanding in the marketplace of how email prioritization impacts users in their day-to-day usage of email.  Most people don’t use prioritization as an absolute guide to how they process email, but instead as an indicator for classes and groups of emails that they want to initally focus their attention on and which ones to completely ignore.  In that first phase of email triage, smart technology can learn which classes of marketing email people actually care about.

Another advancement in email is understanding the nature of different types of emails and putting them in the appropriate context.  The inbox is one big  bucket where all email is handled the same way.  But many people don’t want to deal with marketing emails while they are focused on getting their work done.  On the other hand, they very well might want to see what discounts they have been sent from stores they frequent before doing some shopping online or heading to the mall.  That’s where features like our Notification Managers can be used to automatically send entire classes of email like retail marketing messages into a specific area, perhaps categorized by retailer. Instead of frustrating people and getting deleted or unsubscribed from, these messages can be put in a context where people can get real value from them at the appropriate time.

A couple of commenters write that email marketers can succeed by "delivering useful, targeted content and offers on a regular basis" and that "relevance will dictate if an email is read or not."  I think those comments are right on the money.  The right next-generation email technology might banish unwanted direct marketing emails, but if done right, it will also identify and help people utilize the marketing emails that are actually relevant and valuable to them.

Wow.  What a month.  I can’t believe it has been almost a month since my last blog post.  Sorry about that, but between ClearContext and IORG (with a few tennis matches thrown in, some epic Wimbledon to watch, and the fourth of July!) I’ve been too swamped to even think about it.

But there’s so much to write about.  Most importantly, we’re almost ready for the IORG Conference on Tuesday, July 15.  I’m very excited about the group we have attending the conference.  The group includes some of the top minds in academic and corporate research of information overload, a lot of software execs on the leading edge of technology to combat information overload, and a number of analysts, authors, and businesspeople who are focused on studying, analyzing, and addressing the challenges of information overload faced by both individuals and corporations.

We’ll have a lot of Information Overload Research Group news in the next week or two that I can’t wait to share with you.  A lot of great people and companies are rallying around IORG – there’s no question that there’s an intense need for a group like this.  As we continue to expand our membership, we’ll be well positioned to facilitate the types of collaborations between university researchers, corporate researchers, software and other solution providers, and end-users that will lead to solutions that really work.  I can’t wait to get moving.

And the coverage about IORG continues to be great.  Here are a couple of recent pieces in the Wall Street Journal by Gordon Crovitz and USA Today Tech Blog by Jon Swartz.  Hope to meet some of you on Tuesday in New York!