- Let me describe a fairly common scenario.
John sends an email to Sally.
Sally sends a reply.
John responses to her again.
Sally forwards the email to Bill with a question.
Bill responses to Sally and attaches a document.
Sally replies to both John
and Bill and references the attached document.
Unfortunately, John doesn't have
that document because he wasn't on that email,
so he has to contact Bill, and ask for it.
But while he's doing that,
Sally has forwarded the document to five other people.
And they start emailing about it
and not everyone is on every email,
which means the conversation has now gotten out of hand.
Worse yet, people are making changes to the document,
and there are about seven versions floating around,
and it would be more or less impossible to say
which is the definitive version at this point,
because not everyone has seen all
of the various additions and changes.
What a mess, huh?
But it happens all the time.
The problem here is that although email is a great
tool for sharing information,
it is not that good at enabling ongoing conversations,
especially with larger groups.
Now, what would we experience if we tried
that in a community-based collaboration tool
like Microsoft Yammer?
This time, John sends a private message to Sally
that kicks off the conversation.
Sally responses in the message thread,
and then John replies to her.
Sally then adds Bob to the thread,
and he responds, and he adds an attachment.
But here's where things start
to become noticeably different.
First of all, John can see that response from Bob.
It's still happening inside the same message.
The entire conversation is in one place.
And the file Bob added is attached to the message too.
Of course, what would
have been even better would be if Bob had added a link
to the file, rather than attaching it.
Well, we gotta walk before we can run.
Anyways, now, if the terrible trio
want to add more people to the conversation,
they can either add individuals
or they can share the thread with the group,
which means that everyone in the group would now be
able to follow and participate
in the same conversation in the same place,
while looking at the same accompanying file.
Doesn't that make more sense?
And the conversation persists so that people can go back
and reference it later.
So my rule of thumb, when possible,
save email for sending direct messages
that aren't going to need a lot of back and forth.
If you have a chat tool available,
and I don't care if it's Slack or Spark or whatever.
If you want to have an ongoing conversation about something,
this is the way to do it.