The best boss I ever had—Ed Hahn, who directed Organization Development at Mattel—made it clear: You’re only work colleagues until you get to know each other. After that, you’re friends, acquaintances, or enemies. Work, Ed said, is social.

via Facebook at work isn’t an either/or proposition

Email overload

In this post, Shel Holtz talks about how Facebook is becoming a more responsive form of communication than email. Too often, important messages get lost in your email (sometimes on purpose). I have emails in my inbox which have been there for months just waiting for me to action them one day. I’ve even taken the little red flag off some because I know I’m not ever going to get to them.

Email has been around now for decades. It’s a staple of our information diet and we’ve learnt how to deal with it. We have even developed specific behaviours around email, mainly because there is just so much of it to deal with.

Shel describes a distinct difference with social networks. The difference being that there is a strong desire to respond when a friend contacts you via Facebook, Twitter or other “social” tools.

• Is this just because social networks are still a new phenomenon?
• Is it because the “status update mountain” is still a molehill, unlike the “email mountain” becoming Everest?
• Or is there perhaps something else at play here?

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