How Microblogging Replaces Email, IM and Forums

Enterprises that have deployed microblogging are filling a gap in their
communication and collaboration needs that before was only partially filled by
email, instant messaging, forums/discussion boards. Most notably, some
organizations have seen email volume decline by over 30%, as microblogging is
used for the above three core patterns.

The table above illustrates some of the differences between communication
modalities. While many refer to Microblogging as real time, it actually is not.
Microblogging is a new asynchronous modality that feels like it is real time to many
users . Some user interfaces, such as Adobe AIR based Desktop applications,
provide automatic polling that pull messages rapidly into the user’s view.
Synchronous modalities have live sessions between users, that can create
expensive interruptions. Microblogging straddles asynchronous and synchronous
communication, providing the best of both worlds.
Whereas Microblogging is a pull medium, Email is a push medium. You have no
control over what goes into your inbox. The transaction cost for someone to send
an email is nominal, especially for adding another person to a CC line. As a result,
people are overwhelmed with email, spending as much as 4 hours a day in their
inbox. 30% of email is what the Gartner Group describes as Occupational Spam.
Characterized by excessive CCing, it is stretching the use of email for group
communication into a broadcast medium. In part because of this implicit cost on
people’s time, addressing an email has a cognitive load and it is often difficult to
decide who should receive it. Email is best used for one-to-one or one-to-few
asynchronous communications that require formality and length.
Instant Messaging, once users have chosen to add each other to their buddy lists, is
also a push medium. Because it is synchronous, it demands focused attention and is

prone to interrupt people while they are engaged in other tasks (researchers have found that when interrupted, it takes 15 minutes to cognitively recover and return to the task at hand, what they call the Interruption Tax). Status in IM is rarely
updated by users and reflects the state of a communication channel (busy,
available), not the context of what someone is working on. IM is best used for short
one-to-one conversations and escalating urgent issues (which could be further
escalated to voice).
Forums, or discussion boards, is a pull medium. You choose when you want to
consume information. However, it is topic-centric, not people-centric. You can
choose a given topic, but you have to browse through every message to find the
one you are looking for, or more importantly the one from the person you trust on
that topic. Forums are good for heavily moderated topical conversations over a
prolonged period.
Here are some best practices for what modality to use when:

• Email: best for one-to-one or one-to-few communication that is more formal

• IM: best for escalating issues in one-to-one conversations with known colleagues

• Forums: best for topic-centric many-to-many moderated communication

• Microblogging: best for people-centric, near real-time and many-to-many communication

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