A recent article by Michael Arrington on TechCrunch made me stop to think about my own approach and attitude towards voicemail, the long time King of office communication.
The article’s premise is that voicemail is inefficient, out of favor, andhas been downright abandoned by some folks.
Typical voicemail messages today include things like “Please don’t leave me a voicemail, I rarely listen to them. Please just email me at xxxx@xxxx.com” Many people don’t bother setting up their voicemail accounts at all. Then there’s my favorite method, the one I use personally - let the message box get full and then don’t empty it. Caller ID still tells me who called, and I can simply call them back.
How many times have you called someone back and said “I saw that you called but didn’t listen to the voicemail yet, Is it anything urgent?”
I notice that I rely on voicemail much less too. In fact, I prefer to not use it unless in required to. There are simply too many better alternatives. E-mail, Text Message/SMS, Twitter, or Instant Message. Text Messaging has become the defacto standard for team communication in my organization. It’s pretty common to receive messages from team members throughout the day, in and out of meetings, and even during the same meeting (ala the Twitter backchannel at conferences).
Why? Because it’s a heck of a lot faster for me to read a message than muddle my way through an ancient enterprise voicemail system until I am able to retreive the desired voicemail. Besides, abandoning voicemail means one less password to remember and constantly change due to forced password rotation policies.
Are you still using voicemail as an everday business tool or has something replaced it? If so, what?
I found a fantastic presentation today on Slideshare. Then, immediately shared it with some colleagues on Twitter, and it took off from there. I encourage you to share it with anyone new to the social media/networking space, and anyone you know affiliated with marketing or branding.
For those of you looking to efficiently deal with web 2.0 and social media information overload, here is a solution. Daniel Smith, author of the Smithereens blog, recently put together a great step-by-step article on how to use Google Reader as your personal “Web Brain”. Check it out.
I enjoyed this video of Joe Crump, Vice President, Strategy & Planning, Avenue A | Razorfish, in which he describes how the marketing/advertising industry and brands have entered a new era, one he calls Digital Darwinism. It’s a 16 minute video full of trends and perspectives on the state of the industry that you should carefully consider. Because in this era, only the strongest brands will survive.
“The age of Digital Darwinism has arrived. An age of blindingly fast pace, technology is leapfrogging, television is failing, and the brand landscape is changing more than ever before.”
I’ve also embedded the slides he used during the presentation. See below.
