In a world of clogged inboxes and the wide-spread use of portable devices, conciseness and quality content are of the utmost importance when sending email.

An effective subject line is a great place to start.

Although I consider myself adept at communicating through the written word, I used to find myself struggling to come up with the perfect, oh-so-clever (or, at the very least, informative) subject line to send along with my emails. Instead, I ended up sending out drivel like, “Hello”, “Monday” or “Important”.

Below are 4 tips I’ve found to write effective subject lines.

Tip 1: Relevance is Key

Everyone has a philosophy on the subject line, but almost everyone seems to agree that a subject line should be more than an afterthought. I spoke with people in various industries and one of the main complaints about the subject line is that it tends to lose its relevance as it proceeds down the forward and reply chain. Or, the subject line never had any relevance.

For instance, Mitch, the production manager at a business publication, complained to me about receiving emails from PR reps and reporters with the subject line, “FW: Re: Thanks for the Interview!” Mitch doesn’t care about the interview or the PR’s flack’s gratitude, only the photo attachment that needs to be placed in the paper. If the sender has changed the subject line to, “Photo of Acme Co. CEO, Joe Schmoe” Mitch will save valuable time on deadline day when he needs to locate that attachment.

Tip 2: Make it Searchable

Searchability is one of the primary reasons to write a good subject line. It behooves not only the recipient of the email but also you, as the sender, when you get a reply to that message.

I spoke with Mike, who works in the design field and juggles multiple clients and projects. His greatest frustration is when a client or coworker sends an email with a generic subject line such as, “Issues” or “Contract”. This guy deals with a lot of issues every day relating to a lot of contracts with many different clients. Of course he could create folders or labels and sort the emails, but what if he hops on an important call and forgets to do so? Tracking down those issues then becomes more of a headache than dealing with the actual issues. If the subject line read, “McCullion Project-Issues with Drawing A3.54 Elevator Vestibule” it would save him and his client a great deal of time.

Tip 3: Say it in One Line

As more and more people rely on portable devices, emails are increasingly shrinking in length. Subject lines become even more important in this context since it saves people the trouble of opening up an individual email message. Many believe that even desktop emailers should rely exclusively on subject lines in certain situations. It saves everyone time and lets people off the hook in using social niceties, like greetings and salutations.

Emailers on the go would also argue that it’s nice to know as much about the issue (or lack thereof) simply by reading the subject line in order to facilitate prioritizing which emails to get to first. For instance, an email from your boss with the subject line, “Never Received Documents for Today’s Presentation. Send ASAP!” will most certainly take precedent over an email sent from your mom entitled, “NYTimes.com: Woody Allen’s Quest to Find New York’s Best Chicken Soup.” Similarly, your mom’s email might be bumped to the highest priority if the subject line reads, “Call home immediately. Emergency with Dad.”

Examples of good vs. bad one-line emails:

Bad: “Late”
Good: “Running 15 minutes late for 2:30 meeting.”

Bad: “Important”
Good:“Re-Send Tartofsky Memo as Attachment ASAP”

Bad: “Read This”
Good: “Article from WSJ on Budget Deficit that we Discussed”

Bad: “Coffee?”
Good: “Are you free to grab coffee next Tues. at 10 a.m.?”

Bad: “Meeting”
Good: “Meeting notes from Wednesday June 6, 2009″

Tip 4: Use Acronyms

Taking this to the next level involves using acronyms at the beginning or end of a subject line to help the recipient decipher the intention/importance of a message.

Katie, an event planner at a nonprofit organization, receives an onslaught of emails every day. Her organization has established some guidelines for sending emails that encourage staffers to use acronyms to help other staffers prioritize their inbox. These acronym are used widely today and are touted by efficiency experts.

Katie’s organization, for instance, uses “RRR”, which stands for “Read, Review, Respond”, at the beginning of a subject line, such as, “RRR: Proposal to Cooper Foundation.” This allows Katie to easily identify an email that needs attention, as opposed to an email that’s non-work related, but sent from a colleague, or a low-priority work email. If it’s non-work related, staffers are encourage to use “ZZZ”, such as “ZZZ: Peet’s Coffee coupons in the kitchen”. If it’s work-related, but more office-oriented, they write, Office Related Matter, “ORM: printer broken on 4th floor”.

Two widely-used acronyms are “EOM” or “End of Message”, which lets the reader know that the whole message is contained in the subject line, and “NRN” or “No Reply Needed”, which frees the recipient from any obligation to reply to the message.

Other widely-used acronyms are: AET: Answer Expected Today; AR: Action Required;
and RR: Reply requested.

If this all seems overly-complicated or a potential time-suck, just remember, the whole point in writing good subject lines is to save time. Think about the most important/actionable item in the email and stick it in the subject line. And, be sure to think about what will help you and the email recipient save valuable time when searching for an email if it gets buried in an inbox. A couple of extra moments spent on a subject line might save you a whole lot of time and frustration down the road.

And, if you are looking for some inspiration, take a look at Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox, where he discusses the BBC’s brilliant use of precise communication in its headlines.

I was searching for Nicole’s email address in Outlook when I came across her status on my Xobni Facebook feed. There it was.

R.I.P., MJ.

I check the news every day, multiple times a day and yet, increasingly, email and social networking sites are becoming an equally important source of information. This is true of pop-culture updates and also more “important news”. (Although, Michael Jackson’s death is certainly important news to me!)

News travels fast these days and we have greater access to more information. Social networking sites have made this true of personal information, as well.

As the line between one’s professional life and personal life becomes increasingly blurred, the personal lives of professional contacts might just become another source of “news”.

Perhaps we’re already moving towards a culture in which we expect people who we know professionally to be aware of what was previously considered personal information.

Cultivating information through Xobni’s Facebook feed, we can learn things that might benefit us professionally. Xobni creates a link between Outlook and Facebook. This can reveal important personal information about your contacts.

Perhaps there’s a client who you haven’t reached out to in a while. Viewing their Facebook status through Xobni you might learn that they just had a baby or went on a trip to Africa. You’ve just unveiled personal information that provides something to discuss other than work when you send that long overdue email or pick up the phone and give your client a ring.

Utilizing this Xobni feature is a valuable tool for professionals living in an age of online social networking. And, if your professional contacts happen to keep tabs on celebrity gossip, their Facebook feeds might also provide a nice break during a hectic day.

Scientists recently gleaned valuable information from emails sent by its employees in the 18 months prior to the company’s collapse. NewScientist reported that two researchers at the Florida Institute of Technology assessed 517,000 emails sent to approximately 15,000 employees at the now defunct energy company.

The study, which did not look at the content of emails, only the numbers sent and the patterns of senders and recipients, showed that the most significant changes in employee’s behavior occurred one month prior to the company’s collapse.

The data showed that “email cliques”, a group in which every member has had direct email access with another member, jumped from 100 to almost 800 around November 1, 2001, one month prior to the company’s fall. This suggests that in stressful times, people talk more with people who they feel more comfortable with, and less with people who they don’t.

The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission made Enron’s emails public in 2003, when it was conducting an investigation of the company. Such a large sample of emails had previously never been available due to privacy concerns and regulation. This provided scientists a unique opportunity.

This is not the first time that researchers looked to Enron for clues on email patterns and employee behavior.

Back in 2005, Gina Kolata of the New York Times reported on similar studies conducted by computer scientists at universities in the United States and Canada.

These studies used Enron emails to test theories on how email communication reflects group dynamics and hidden social structures within an organization. A scientist at Carnegie Mellon University offers that email communication can reveal informal organizations within a company that may underlie “unofficial” power structures that exist outside of the defined corporate hierarchy, similar to the “cliques” theory mentioned above.

It all sounds a bit like high school.

CNET News, in 2003, reported on a study by two scientists at Hewlett-Packard using emails from within that organization. They too discovered that there were informal communities within organizations that came about when people needed to communicate across departments or work together on projects.

Such studies suggest interesting patterns in leadership and power that are not necessarily defined by an organization. Identifying these leaders and organizations might be useful in improving communication and productivity. Or, it might signify shifts in stability or stress, such as in the case of Enron.

It is interesting to think about how human social patterns factor into the workplace and transfer to electronic communication. Shifts in employee interaction-including electronic interaction-can signify very important things.

Future email studies will most likely be few and far between, considering privacy regulations. However, companies might encourage their employees to assess their email patterns using analytics tools, which are built into software such as Xobni, to reveal the “cliques” that they are a part of.

Then, the company can elect a prom king.

Jake discovered Xobni on Lifehacker.com and has been using Xobni for at least one year. Western ECI is a small company of only 10 employees, and 2 or 3 of their employees are using Xobni. Jake is a big fan of Xobni because he manages many small projects and deals with many different clients. Xobni makes his job easier.

Jake told me he gets between 20-60 emails each day. 50% of his email comes from people within his company and 50% are with people outside his company. I thought he’d tell me Xobni was more helpful managing external communications, but he said it honestly helped him a ton with both categories.

When Jake and I really got deep into the conversation, he admitted to me why he really likes Xobni. He told me that his company has a filing system for organizing emails into Outlook folders - but Jake gets lazy about staying on top of foldering all the email he gets. He is even worse about filing sent emails, which are often just as important. He said Xobni gives him all the benefits of being organized without having to work as hard. I admitted that is exactly what I love about Xobni, and is much of the reason we created it.

Jake also told me another cool anecdote. He said he sometimes uses Xobni for silly, non-important things, like looking up the picture of someone he’s never met before, but has exchanged tons of email. With one click he can pull up their LinkedIn profile or Facebook profile and learn all about them. For him it isn’t necessarily something that is important to his job, but he finds it fun. If Xobni can make email more fun for Jake, that makes me happy. That is why we have t-shirts that say “love email again.” It used to be fun to hear that AOL “you’ve got mail” notification. Then email become overwhelming and wasn’t cool anymore. We like to think Xobni can make email cool again. I know Jake feels we have.

Jake wasn’t all praises. He had his list of feature requests like all Xobni users seem to have. He wanted to do more powerful things with the contacts list Xobni creates. He wanted to be able to easily share contact information across his company and he wanted to see more advanced options in our search feature. Jake had a lot of good ideas, and he will be happy to know that a lot of what he wants will be coming to Xobni users soon.

We really like talking to our users. If you have 30 minutes to spare in your busy day, I’d like to talk to you about how you use Xobni for your job. I’ll write about our conversation here on the Xobni blog and we’ll send you a few Xobni tshirts to share with your co-workers. Submit a comment to our blog if you’d like to participate.

As a professional organizer, Michelle helps families and companies organize the processes by which they run their lives and their businesses. This ranges from new organizing systems for their closets at home to filing systems and work-flow management systems for the office. You can read about Michelle’s business on her website RealNeat.com

While Michelle focuses on organizing people’s physical information, she uses xobni to organize her digital information.

Michelle gets a lot of personal and business email and loves that Xobni organizes her inbox around people. She enjoys the automatic contact information extraction, the photos of her contacts, and having all of the conversations and attachments from a contact in one place. Michelle has been using Xobni for 6 months, and regrets not finding it earlier!

I asked Michelle about a couple unique ways she uses Xobni. She had some pretty cool examples to share. Here are a few:

Michelle is a leader of a mothers’ group in Kentucky. The mothers’ group shares information about all things related to being a mom: what schools to send kids to, where to get clothes for the kids, recommendations on music teachers, etc Michelle said these interactions always happen through email, because when you are a busy mom with kids crying in the background, the phone just doesn’t cut it. Michelle likes that Xobni organizes all of the conversations and contacts she has from her mothers’ group, making it really easy to find exactly what she needs.

Another cool example of how Michelle uses Xobni came from her experience after the National Professional Organizers Conference. Just like we’ve all experienced after returning from a conference, Michelle got inundated with emails from new contacts after the event. Michelle told me she isn’t great at remembering people’s names, however, she never forgets a face. She used Xobni to manage all of her incoming email from the conference. Xobni put a face to every name. She would remember “oh yeah, Jim, I recognize him, I talked to him at the happy hour on Thursday”, “Carrie, right, she was the speaker on day two.” Without Xobni, and the pictures Xobni pulls from LinkedIn and Facebook, Michelle never would have known how she met each person that emailed her.

I really enjoyed speaking with Michelle. It was great to hear how a mother/small business owner/professional organizer uses Xobni. Michelle has told so many people about Xobni, if she wasn’t running her own business we’d hire her to work on our marketing team!

We have spent the last 3 years taming Outlook and bringing lightning fast search and people-centric information organization to our users. This is something our users know, but is particularly interesting today in light of the announcement from Google where they announced support of Outlook with Google Apps. What does this mean? It means any Google Apps premium user can now use Outlook to read and write their email. This also means Google Apps users can now use Xobni with their Outlook.

Now Google Apps users can take advantage of these great Xobni features:

• Lightning Fast Search
• Email conversation threading
• Pictures, status, and profile information from Facebook, Linkedin & Hoovers
• Automatic phone number extraction
• Attachment management
• Powerful email analytics
• And more…

We spent the afternoon testing Xobni with the new Google Apps Sync for Microsoft Outlook and we are compatible. Now all of those Google Apps users out there that wanted to use Xobni, but couldn’t because their environment didn’t support Outlook, can now give Xobni a try. Welcome aboard!

Download Xobni for Free here

This morning, during Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz’s keynote address at JavaOne, Alan Brenner (RIM’s SVP of BlackBerry Platforms) showed off Xobni for the BlackBerry. Alan highlighted how this will not be just another stand-alone application on your BlackBerry; Xobni Mobile will be deeply integrated into your mobile experience.  For example, you will be able utilize the power of Xobni’s comprehensive people search directly from the completely familiar BlackBerry “Compose Email” screen.

Jonathan Schwartz and Alan Brenner on stage at JavaONE with Xobni Mobile

Why do you need another addressbook?  We have all been on the go, away from the office, desperate to email someone that we know we have been in touch with in the past.  Today you might be stuck fruitlessly hunting for their details (or calling a coworker to look up the information).  With Xobni Mobile, just start a new email message as you normally would, then select the Xobni bar and type in the first letter(s) of their first name, last name, or company name.  Instantly you’ll see results from everyone who has ever emailed you, ranked by importance to you (with profile photos & job titles too!).  Just select the desired person and their email address will be placed into the To/Cc/Bcc field of your choice.

Because Xobni scans all of your emails for contact information, Xobni’s people search often contains 10-30 times the number of contacts that are in a typical Contacts list, and requires no work to maintain.

More details will come further down the road, but we wanted to let you – our beloved Xobni users – know about the latest in our efforts to allow you to take Xobni with you everywhere, saving you precious time when it really counts.  For more updates, please sign up to be notified when Xobni mobile is available here.

Today I was fortunate enough to talk with Tom Kronenburg on his cell phone from Utrecht, Netherlands. Xobni has tons of users in the Netherlands. I forgot to ask Tom, but I have a suspicion that the word “Xobni” means “Free Beer” in Dutch, so the Dutch people are naturally very excited about what we are working on.

Tom, pictured here, is a consultant at Capgemini and also the founder of a new startup. For those of you that don’t know, Capgemini is a 10,000 employee global company that offers organizational consulting, systems integration, and other IT services. Tom works in the organizational consulting business. Tom mostly consults to the public sector: schools, ministry of education, government loan offices, etc.

Tom is a self proclaimed early adopter and discovered Xobni on the blog Techcrunch.com 1.5 years ago. We were in private beta, but Tom emailed some other early Xobni users at his office, and one of them sent him an invite. He was one of our earliest users!
Tom deals with a lot of external clients, as well as other consultants within Capgemini. I was shocked by this number, but Tom sends and receives between 10 and 50 attachments each day! His job consists of creating reports and slide decks which he sends back and forth between other consultants and his clients. Xobni’s Files Exchanged feature is by far his most used feature, and saves him hours of searching each week.

Tom also loves xobni’s people search feature, so he can quicklyfind email addresses and telephone numbers for his contacts. Xobni’s profiles are a much quicker way for him to find this information that was previously buried within thousands of emails.

As part of my phone call, I spent some time learning about what Tom wants to see in future versions of Xobni. Because Tom uses the files exchanged feature so much, he’d like to see that improved. He’d love to see group collaboration feature built around this feature.

Also, Tom uses the LinkedIn extension a lot, but doesn’t use the Facebook or Hoover’s extension as much, simply because these websites aren’t as big in the Netherlands. The biggest social network in the Netherlands is Hyves, and Tom would love to see that data in Xobni.

I had a great call with Tom, and learned a lot. It makes me excited about doing these calls with users every week.

It was especially cool speaking with Tom because he is working on a startup of his own. HelpWithThisForm.nl embeds a discussion forum next to forms on government and company websites. It helps crowdsource the Q&A that often accompanies a confusing form. I think this is a pretty cool idea, and it is very cool that Tom is also using Xobni to manage his email at his startup. We’ll be looking out for them when they launch.

Thanks Tom!

Where do our users work? What is the hardest thing about using email at their job? And how is Xobni impacting their life?

So, I’ve decided to spend 20-30 minutes on the phone with one user per week. I’m not going to have a rigid format for the discussion, but this will be formalizing something I already do every week.

I’m going to write one blog post each week about the person I met, what they do for a living, how Xobni solves their needs, and how Xobni can be improved to make their email life even better.

I’m hoping I can get each person to send me a picture of them and a link to their blog, company website or twitter page they would like me to share with the Xobni community. I’m also going to send off a couple Xobni tshirts to everyone I talk to – so they can share Xobni with their friends and coworkers.

I believe by setting aside time to talk with one user per week I can help extend Xobni’s mission of email happiness.

Are you interested in being one of the first Xobni users featured in One User Per Week? Comment on this blog post. We’ll reach out to you to set up a time for a call. I’m looking forward to our phone call.

Note: when you submit a comment to the xobni blog, you will be asked for your email address. Your email address will not be posted publicly on the blog. Then we’ll contact you by email to get your phone number and schedule a phone call.

We’re not going go into too many details quite yet, but rest assured, Xobni users will soon be able to have access to many of the relationship management features they already love on their desktop from their mobile phones as well. Think of it as your phone’s address book getting even smarter.

Keep an eye out in the coming weeks for more information about Xobni’s mobile product. In the meantime, be the first to try Xobni Mobile by signing up here. And, for those of you at WES in Orlando this week, please stop by and meet our team.