You’ve got (old) mail

Email was invented by a 14 year-old.

Nearly forty years on, many businesses are still using V.A. Shiva Ayyadurai’s innovation, essentially unchanged, in a world that’s very different.

No wonder email is becoming e-fail.

Its inventor said that email is ‘electronic mail with the emphasis on the word mail.’ He also said that ‘electronic mail is the electrification of letters.’ Both of which are fine if a letter is all you want to send. But in a world of business where communications need to be more comprehensive, and collaboration is the key to success, you need more than mail – electrified or otherwise.

Forty years on, email can even start to make snail mail look attractive.

After all, letters don’t contain Trojans that break into your house and take it over when you’re not looking. You never receive so many letters in a day that you can’t sift out the important ones from the circulars.

And if you want to refer back to an earlier letter, you don’t have to read all the post you’ve ever had, in reverse order, and hope you can spot the one you want – when they all begin with ‘RE: XYZ’.

But there’s more to a successful business than correspondence, by post or email. Innovation is a business’s lifeblood, and creativity and collaboration provide the heartbeat. Try doing either of those by mail – whether snail mail or email – and the results will be far from electrifying.  

So, forty years on, how do you move on?

First, forget ‘Send’ and ‘Receive’. Instead, think ‘Share’. Or to put it another way, forget ‘corresponding’ and think ‘collaborating.’ Putting your ideas, your documents or your presentations out there for your team, and waiting for teamwork to do its work.

When you use a platform like gruup, instead of the two-way street of email you’ve suddenly got a major traffic intersection, with ideas flowing in all directions at once. But rather than risking a collision, you’re encouraging inspiration.

Second, don’t be limited by letters.

Think images. Videos. PDFs. Moodboards. All-singing, all-dancing, and all instantly available to everyone you want to see them, all in one place. No attachments to open (or to forget to attach). No format conflicts. No problem finding whatever you want to look at, whether you’re looking tomorrow, next week or next year.

Third, avoid the e-maelstrom and bring order to chaos.

With gruup it’s easy to create individual hubs for each project, to have work streams within hubs for more effective organisation, and to share workloads and responsibilities so everyone knows who is doing what, when and where. Then when you want to work together rather than apart, gruup makes it easy to share content, collaborate on ideas, and keep everyone in the loop.

Email isn’t dead. It’s just old, slow and outdated. So if you want to do more, and do it faster and more efficiently, there are better ways to go about it.

Use email to keep in touch if you must. But don’t let it lull you into being a business that’s out-of-touch.

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