Former SMT Blogger of the Week Luis Suarez has a column in the New York Times today describing how he has drastically cut the amount of time and energy he spends on email, by making greater use of social networking tools. SMT readers have been following Suarez's experiment for weeks -- most recently, Suarez shared a report on Week 14.
Suarez, a social media evangelist at IBM, talks in the column about IBM's embrace of social media for business purposes inside the corporate firewall. SMT readers are familiar with that topic as well, through an extensive white paper entitled IBM and Employee-Centered Social Media. The white paper is available to registered SMT members via a prominent link in the right column of the homepage.
Mad props (as my sons would say) to Luis for conducting an interesting experiement and sharing his findings. But I have to quibble slightly with the last paragraph in his column, where he says "E-mail can become extinct, if not repurposed altogether, even at big companies like I.B.M." I don't think email is in any more danger of becoming extinct than, say, radio or books. But as I say, that's a quibble -- Luis's ideas are well worth reading and considering.