Email as a problem space goes so deep and so wide, it’s difficult for most people to articulate. Even though much of their job is centered around the operation of email, and passing information from one entity to another through it, people have a hard time getting past the “necessary evil,” descriptor.

Yet entire organizations, almost as a function of cognitive dissonance, continue shoveling coal (read: dollars and workplace efficiency), into this steam engine that is fundamentally broken.

This dawned on me recently as a large agency (who’s name will be withheld to protect the innocent), announced it was switching from Outlook to LotusNotes. Say there’s 1000 employees there using Outlook (there are many more, but just to have a nice number).

Is it too far fetched to say that simply by making this switch and having to adjust to a new email interface, and new email-capable phones, each employee loses 1 hour of work time in the year? What about 4 hours? Ten hours? At a blended rate of $150 per hour and net revenue of $60, the agency decision just lost $1,500,000 in billables and $600,000 of net revenue. For each employee to spend two extra minutes a day fidgeting with a device or interface. That’s completely outside any of the actual client work.

So what can we do to make email work in today’s workplace?

Equip employees with a second monitor

This is the thing you can do right now to jump how efficient people are in the workplace. Lifehacker had an article from years ago imploring office workers to upgrade from 17″ to 19″ monitors, citing research that showed an 11% increase in productivity just by adding those two inches.

Today I see it all the time. Much of people’s jobs, especially account leads and managers, is about correctly, efficiently relaying and presenting information in email. Or comparing documents. Or comparing emails and documents to Websites. Casually watching them work on a single screen is more frustrating than any user test.

With every new email or comparison, the constant switching of screens is a cacophony of inefficiency. With every application that needs to be brought to the front, the employees concentration is broken. Then the inevitable, “Wait, what was I looking for?” comes in, and a task that should take 15 seconds is now stretching into 2-3 minutes.

When you have two monitors, these tasks across applications flow with relative ease. Personally, I like to put all communications windows in one monitor and have the other dedicated to workspace. In this scenario, where you have one screen dedicated to email, IM, Twitter, Yammer, etc., new information takes only a glance instead of a small application-flipping process.

Again, this is a quick, get-IT-to-install-it-today kinda fix. The total cost to the organization is less than $1000, and you’re buying into at least 200 new billable hours and better quality for everyone that gets upgraded.

Make a new email interface for your business

Seriously. You’d never think to just roll out a default WordPress installation, or a default CRM, yet everyone in the organization is working from the default design of Outlook, a program little changed from a decade ago. How can this work well for you? It can’t. So everyone tries a workaround. From Yammer to Basecamp to Wikis, people are tacking on anything they can get funding for and alleviate their email barrage.

We need to accept that email isn’t dead; that it will evolve into something else over the next decade as boomers retire. With this acceptance, we need to start looking at how much email people get, how they use it, and the best ways to present it: on the devices the people in the organization use, and for the amount and varying levels of importance email carries. We keep the technical structure, but reformat the interface to better suit our users.

One particular interface design I’ve thought applies well to email use today is TweetDeck. While it’s built to deliver filtered information from Twitter to the desktop, think for a moment about how well it would handle email challenges.

Most emails require nothing more than a cursory glance at the first few lines to update some small bit of information: like a scheduling change, project progress, even a “thanks.” And most replies are friendly ways of saying, “I see this.”

At the same time, most heavy email users employ filters to automatically put emails into folders. But that’s not “flat,” in the sense that you can see what’s in that folder without losing the information you’re currently looking at.

Here’s a quick sketch on what such an email client, built in a platform like AIR, would look like:

Having shown this interface model to a few project lead friends, the early, highly qualitative and unanimous response is “Wow, this would be awesome.” In essence, it treats emails the way people process them: allowing them to scan first, and read selected items in more depth second.

BYO communications app ecosystem

I’ve grown into a big fan of building application ecosystems on top of Apple’s distribution infrastructure. But the bottom line is that the way your organizations runs projects has a core of repeated activities that today we spend a lot of time working around. Getting clients to review content like copy, images, and movies. Milestone and deadline awareness on different project aspects.

Let’s bring these tasks and objects into the enterprise environment: so that companies can gain not only efficiency, but control over the brand, interaction design, and ultimately the complete presentation of the deliverables that make such a valuable part of the relationship.

And this doesn’t even account for workflow that needs to extend all the way out to an external audience. These days, companies are starting to grasp that brands need to leverage social networking to atomize the brand into smaller more personal relationships with the audience.

Building a communications system that accounts for this channel, whether it’s talking directly to an audience, or flagging assets for a community manager to promote is just one of the key differentiators both agencies and brands need to embrace fully before they get left behind over the next decade.

Ultimately Social Media should be teaching companies how to be scalable and nimble enough to transact communications on any platform quickly: wherever and however the internal and external audiences want.

We’re right on the cusp of communications infrastructure being a selling point for employers and agency selection. The question is: who will be the first to tap into this next computing goldmine?

And Kudos to you for hanging with me through all 1100-some words! If you’re still with me, I’d love to hear your feedback in the comment section below, or on Twitter @mleis.

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What I found was a virtually perfect match for this target’s psychological development stage, their comfort level with multiple technology devices, and a way to satisfy both their social circle and familial obligations. Of course, all roads easily lead back to more engagement with the brand.

Teens need a malleable platform for self-expression

Like him or not, psychologist Erik Erikson (you may remember him from such phrases as “Identity Crisis”) and his theories on how teens test their identities from 12-18 to establish their place in the world is borne out all over Web 2.0.

While User Generated Content has gained recent fame for the sites that thrive on it, very few have wondered why.

The “Why” is that teens need a way to easily create material that can be interacted with, changed quickly, and receive feedback from peers. All of this is necessary for teens to hammer out their identity, and so the platforms for this expression like MySpace, FaceBook, Hi5, etc. become highly prized for their ability to provide this canvas.

According to the Pew Internet and American Life Project, this ability to create and recreate expressions is especially cherished by teen girls. 66% of teen girls age 15-17 online are creating profiles. And 38% of girls across the age spectrum look to these profiles to help them create their own place in the world – online and off.

Because Desktop Widgets are on the client’s computer, it can offer ways for teens to express themselves that the Myspaces and Facebooks of the world simply can’t accomplish. First, it offers teens the ability to create and save different designs without having to show it to the world. Next, many brands targeting teens are already used in the “real world” to experiment with their identity (think makeup, iPods, etc.) and establish a place in their social hierarchy.

By giving teens a more powerful technological and artistic platform within which they can communicate and experiment with other like-minded teens helps them to accomplish the work of their teen years in a way far more appealing than the wide-open expanses of typical UGC sites. Throw in the air of exclusivity that surrounds a society built around your product, and teen girls may just think they’ve died and gone to heaven.

Teen Girls have no problem juggling multiple devices

Today’s 15-17 year old girl is adept at adopting and using new technologies that cross between physical appliances. Again to quote Pew, 84% of online teens own at least one media device, 44% own two or more. Where it comes to Desktop Widgets, like Instant Messaging, about ¾, or 16 million teen girls are active on the platform.

This means they’re already used to downloading applications, updates, and whatever else is needed to keep IMing their friends. But of course, this isn’t the only technology teens use to communicate. Between texting, posting messages on friend’s pages, cell phones, song sharing, and using iTunes and iPods, there’s really very little barrier for teens to try and use Desktop Widgets.

This mix of technology shows up in spades when you look at these girl’s personal sites. They’re creating their online presence with a mix of media from various content sources. The more community-based content brands can offer their audience through the desktop widget, the more the audience will use that content to express themselves elsewhere online. Where the brand’s tech-savvy users take advantage of this content to express themselves, there is an audience of girls looking to find those creations and form their own opinions from them.

Of course, this is an excellent viral indicator to keep the created content within the desktop widget environment and stimulate more download activity. For example, someone could make an original expression or enter a contest (the tech-savvy), and already have developed a channel or group of online friends to email and encourage to download the application.

Helping girls with their friends and family

It’s just as important for teen girls to maintain/improve rank within their own social circles as it is to work within the family rules. The desktop platform combined with brand equity are an excellent mix for a win-win on both sides that teen girls will appreciate.

As a social example, we’ll start with the idea that we can release Myspace re-designs that fit with their current mood or form of self-expression. On the surface, it seems good enough, right? But in the desktop space even this function comes alive.

Because of the persistence of the desktop application and the ability to update content without interrupting the user experience, you can constantly keep a new, fresh stock of myspace templates: alerting the community instantly when they appear in the application. This creates a need to have the newest myspace look, as well as the urgency to take advantage of the inventory that currently exists before it’s gone.

Even more exciting, though is the ability within Desktop Widgets to push granular content, right down to individual users. In this case, you could award a contest winner with exclusive MySpace template designs no one else has access to. Then, allow the user to distribute that template to only a handful of recipients, who will need to download the desktop widget in order to claim their exclusive design. This works well for IM icons, too.

Parents are especially concerned with their 15-17 year old daughters life online, and want to make sure that the socializing they do online doesn’t expose them to any unwanted portion of society. This comes in the technological form of mail filters and web-tracking software, and the not-so-technical POS (parent over shoulder).

Desktop Widgets of closed communities of girls put parents at ease. This social network isn’t available to any random person sniffing around the Internet, only to those who have registered. And because tracking is so granular in the desktop environment, you can even create parent-metrics reports that deliver behavior back to concerned, tech-savvy parents.

For the POS crowd, Desktop Widgets delivered by your brand assure parents that their teens are not opening themselves up to the entire world of Web surfers, just the same girls they carpool to movies, buy makeup, clothing, or any other product that brings girls of this age together.

Really, what all this research shows us is what brand managers already apply to teens when marketing product: give them a way to communicate with similar girls and share ideas and feedback with those girls. Simply bring it to the desktop to add incredible engagement and loyalty to your brand while it delights teen girls as well as their parents.

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We are proud to offer our congratulations to Anthony Capozzoli and Unabellavista.com on the successful launch of Diretto, the UBV widget.

From Facebok to MySpace, iGoogle to Apple Dashboard, and everything in-between, Diretto is chock-full of everything that makes the Unabellavista site and book and podcasts so great.

He’s got a fantastic talent for weaving the rich history and culture of Italy through tips, pictures, and guides that help you get the most out of Italy, whether you’re roaming Rome, or just imagining it from your living room.

In Diretto everyday you’ll find another breathtaking image from some Italian locale (which you can save as your desktop background), an Italian word of the day, a tip, and some interesting tidbit on Italian food & wine. Go ahead, explore it above and then put it wherever you need a little interesting delight in your day.

Of course, big thanks go out to the Emergers who made this whole thing happen:
Mark Smith, the project manager
Adam Fox on the interface design
Matt Pedersen: Flash freak, Clearspring dynamo

Again, congratulations, and Ciao!

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Next Monday (June 16) and Tuesday (June 17) in NYC, WidgetWebExpo has developed into the monster truck rally for thought leaders on Widgets, portable technology, and social media. You’ll pay for the whole seat, but you’ll only need the edge.

Speaking of EDGE, you can also catch the entire conference lineup on this cool iPhone-formatted site here.

That Monday, I’ll be leading What’s the Frequency, Kenneth? A presentation on agency widget strategy.

So please, stop on by and say hello, and check back here at the New Media Buzz as I try to capture as much of the conference as I can for all the Emergers and other folks who couldn’t make it.

See you there!
Michael

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Well, as I said way back in November, Bud.tv isn’t anything without a widget strategy. So when I got this email from them saying a new widget was available, I jumped right over to check it out. And I must say that somehow, they managed to make a widget that is simultaneously wonderfully simple, and woefully inadequate to market the effort effectively.

Simple repurposing works

The Bud.tv widget offers three straightforward functions:
1) Play the “Swear Jar” TV ad.
2) Play the TV ad in other languages
3) Embed the widget in one of many Social Networking Sites

This last feature is powered by Gigya, who sent me to a Facebook screen to add a “my stuff” application to run the widget, then asked me to upload the widget itself into my Facebook profile. If Bud gets even 10% conversion on this process, I’d be surprised.

But I’m trying to keep this part positive. What Bud has done a great job of here is looking at an incredibly popular TV spot, and made it so die-hard fans around the world can share the love.

On this alone, the widget is a win. The spot has already been produced; the media buy is done. Without spending much more, this offers Bud an easy way to stretch those marketing dollars way farther. In a best-case, they’ve opened up an entire ad network with an old TV spot. At worst, they have a living memento for the core audience to watch again and again; a ton of valuable brand exposure for the cost of the bandwidth.

In the most simple, narrow, and single-campaign sense of good CPG widgeting, you have to consider the Bud.tv “Swear Jar” offering a win. And it’s a good takeaway for any campaign on how to effectively use widgets in supporting campaigns by keeping the premise as straightforward as possible.

Not a business solution

The fundamental flaw that continues to plague Bud.tv is a common one for today’s digital marketers: understanding that the goal is not to promote the site in a typical marketing funnel. The goal is to understand that what has been made is a platform for videos, and then creating the appropriate channels for the audience to engage with that inventory of video.

Right now, the Bud.tv site continues to live on a model where you keep coming back to the Website to watch new videos of your favorite “channels.” Unfortunately, this is the premise that will forever doom the site. It breaks Jakob’s Law: Users spend most of their time on other sites.

The deck is already stacked. Users have such ingrained habits about what they do within the browser, it is virtually impossible to elbow your way into that perceptual space.

Bud.tv continues to try with their traditional marketing funnel tactics, thinking that if they can achieve their benchmarks in reach and frequency, eventually people will come back (and the site won’t be such a money suck).

Web 2.0 is a categorical reaction to this unshakable user habit – and the exact problem Bud.tv faces. It basically goes on the premise that users will be anywhere else except your website. So the value here is not your site. Your site is only one channel that sits on a platform. Your widgets and toolbars, desktop apps and screensavers all sit alongside that site like a million open doors.

If you look at the really popular Websites in this Web 2.0 generation, they’re really not Websites in the traditional sense at all. Youtube, Flikr, Facebook… these are all branded ways to access the platform they’ve created. It may be a home of sorts for the user, but there’s no real assumption that this is where all the meaningful user actions take place. All of that valuable interaction takes place everywhere else people can connect to the Internet.

It makes me a bit sad. Bud.tv has done a great job of trying to push towards the frontier of integrating the Web and TV. But it’s as though they took all of yesterday’s marketing rules, built a very strong ladder with it, glued the ladder against a wall, looked up, and found that it was the completely wrong wall.

But all is not lost in Bud town. Hopefully, whoever was responsible for programming their site used object oriented programming and open application standards in building the site. If this is the case, they’re a lot closer to actualizing on their inventory to create the platform this site has wanted to be all along. By allowing users to watch these videos wherever they may be, Bud will be facilitating a valuable relationship instead of trying to force one.

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If you find yourself asking, "Why do I need a widget? Or is it a gadget? What is the difference between a desktop widget and a Web widget? What do I — and don’t I — know about widgets?" Then you’ve come to the right place.

The premiere installment of our new series of free whitepapers, The Art of Widgetry is a sort of widget state of the union. You’ll have a document that covers all the basic forms of widgets so that you can make more informed decisions about how to best invest your dollars in this powerful channel.

More than just a thorough introduction, the goal here is to have you come away with a sense of how to practically apply what we know in the widget space to your business. Clicking over to the Widgeteers page, you’ll also see a few practical examples from clients of Emerge’s.

Lots of stats and shiny charts, too. That makes it great to print in color and hand to your friendly neighborhood executive to give them a quick rundown on everything they need to know about widgets.

Easter egg for NMB readers: Downloading The Art of Widgetry also gives you a link to another insightful whitepaper about creating applications for Facebook — more on that when we officially release that campaign.

And who can end this post without thanking the Emergers behind this eloquent and well-designed project? Not me. So thanks to Dave Albert, our president for shoveling all the coal to make this engine run. Also thanks to Josh Webb (a new designer we’ll be profiling in short order here on NMB), who was responsible for the beautiful widget box you see here and all the rest of the design.

If you haven’t already, please subscribe to the RSS feed to get instant updates when a new post gets fired off the bow of the NMB. Watch out for the recoil!

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How can agencies make widgets work for their clients? It’s part business solution, part campaign, and all about serving the user from the utility of the brand. Michael Leis, VP Strategic Services of Emerge Digital will discuss how agencies can successfully position a widget or mini-application strategy, using the brand as a platform (reaching out) instead of a funnel (pulling in). What results is the ability to tell a deeper, more engaging brand story over time and space that both users and brands will be thanking you for.

It’s shaping to live up to the hype created by the previous WWE’s (not to be confused with the wrestling circuit). With the excellent location, I’m really looking forward to connecting with the forward thinkers in today’s widget space — it’s a promising lineup you should check out.

For those of you who can’t make it out to the Brooklyn Bridge (now there’s an idea for an old micropayment scam updated for Web 2.0 ), I’ll do my best to relay the happenings from the conference here in the New Media Buzz.

Otherwise, I look forward to meeting you there!

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iTunes is the only music store presented in a Desktop Widget.

No other music retailer has acted on the simple premise that if you make buying convenient, consistently fast and easy, the registers ring.

I’ve been waving the Emerge flag on this in different ways here and here, but I wanted to take this opportunity to focus on exactly how iTunes is making things happen by being a music platform on the desktop instead of a music website…

So let’s leave the Apple hype with the coatcheck and browse the reasons why they, or anyone, can succeed by blending the perceptions and abilities of the desktop with the Internet accessibility.

It puts all your music in one place, gives it a usable interface, and lets you play music

iTunes comes down to this really basic service idea. What do people with computers need? An easy way to get to their music and listen to it. All of the rest of the sorting and playlisting functions are key to that mission, but the basics are hard to beat. This kind of simple service and user experience premise can only be achieved on the desktop. No one is going to visit a website to see or open what’s on their computer.

Micropayments

While the micropayment parade of admirers trots gleefully down Facebook street, Apple hasn’t gotten all that much attention for riding the micropayment train all the way to market dominance. Most stories have been about how this has changed the music industry distribution model.

And this isn’t a new concept either, as the pizza place down the block from my house has been enjoying selling by-the-slice to tweens and teens since 45s spun on my record player.

Once a user has gotten comfortable with understanding exactly what they have in their music library, they’re only three clicks and a dollar away from hearing that song they wish they had because this other song they do have reminds them totally of that song.

Note: That last part was written by the logic of the 14-year old persona who hands iTunes all their disposable cash. User experience doesn’t always get explained in 10-word sentences.

Keeping your credit card info

When users save their credit card information at a website, it feels like a leap of faith. Where is my cc number held? How do I know it’s being protected?

These questions could be asked by desktop application users, but in fact are not as big an issue. They have already gone through the process of downloading the application. So they know that is on their computer. The application is constantly showing them and allowing them to interact with files on their own computer.

Even though iTunes Web service is really saving the credit card information, it feels like that information is being stored along with all your songs on your computer. It has the perception of being more secure, more private.

That perception alone turns the iTunes application into an impulse buy machine. Ninety-nine cents feels practically free with such little effort on the part of the user. And the system responds quickly with exactly what you asked for: a product that will always have a far greater emotional value than the price.

I’ll save the rest of my hootin’ and hollerin’ for another day.

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Huge amounts of gratitude go out to everyone who poured their talent and effort into making Gogoinflight.com such a success.

On the Aircell side, we can’t thank Sherri Maxson enough for being a client that truly has an eye for execution and long-term strategy.For Upshot, leading the band again was Paul Marran, Interactive Creative Director — who’s talent is as unassailable as his hard work. That was followed in step by AE Sarah Murphy, AD Tony Mingo (who’s emoticon is a great example of bringing the brand and the emotion together), and CD Pat Lyman. Between Philadelphia, Chicago, Los Angeles, and Phoenix, everyone came together to make great things happen (I think there’s already a commercial about this — we could call this Los Philacagonix).

And of course, our Emergers shined again when the spotlight was the brightest. From our CD Adam Stipanuk and Designer John Stipanuk who brought the interface direction into form with their outsized brains and wireframes (maybe the most underrated deliverable in our business). Then the crazy good Flash work done by Interface designer Adam Fox, and Matt Pedersen, our Flash programmer who I’m not sure sleeps.Mark Wells, our dot-net gunslinger hooked up all the crazy behind-the-scenes db work you’ll never appreciate. And as always, the good-natured, flawless orchestration of Mark Smith, Emerge’s senior producer who continues to motivate and organize our team without leaving any noticeable marks.

All in all, I couldn’t be more excited. For the collaboration, the talent, and the product. Gogo is finally bringing Internet access to Airlines. And we couldn’t be more proud to have been a part of it.

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