An OOF is an out of office message, in internal Microsoft lingo. It stands for ‘Out of Facility’, and is a legacy from Xenix Mail. The command in Xenix mail to set an out-of-office message was oof. The great thing about Outlook 2010 is that a little bar pops up to tell you the person you are emailing has an OOF set, saving you some time in waiting for an OOF response. This little info bar shows lots of other info to help you when you are writing an email, like mixing internal and external emails, and emailing to too many people in one message.
I like to put some effort into writing my OOFs. Yes, most are simple messages that say “Hey I am gone, this is when I am back.” Those are fine. I am not judging, but I like a little spice, a little humor. Something to convert that message into something of interest.
Apparently there are those that really like my OOFs. John Mullinax, an Evangelist out of Southfield, MI for Microsoft decided to make his 200th blog post about my OOFs. I was honored. His post is here: Finally, The Post No One Expected- The Top 9 OOF Messages!.
The funny thing is this was picked up by The Code Project. It was listed on their site and included in their newsletter. This generated so much traffic that is set the record on John’s blog for any single post! Wow! Who would have thought?
John then sent a ‘follow up’ email internally spoofing our internal strategy sharing formats. I have shared some of that here, because it is really funny.
WARNING: THE FOLLOWING IS A SPOOF, AND IS HUMOR. TREAT THIS AS NEWS AND YOU WILL LOOK LIKE AN IDIOT WHO CAN’T READ BIG CAPITAL LETTERS.
After 200 blog posts diligently illuminating the innovation and business value of our emerging technologies, my latest post (no. 201) – which is comprised almost entirely of Brian Prince OOF messages – has become the source of my highest one-day blog traffic ever. As you can imagine, I find this both happy and sad… a source of pride and humility at the same time.
Source: statcounter.com, daily unique users from 18-Jan-2008 to 9-April-2010.
How did this happen, you might ask? Turns out a website called the Code Project, targeted at software developers across all platforms with nearly 7MM+ members and 3.5MM UU/month, picked up on my post and featured it as “Industry News” on their site and also emailed it to their subscribers (yes, right next to SDTimes, CNET, Ars Technica, MobileCrunch, and Tech Republic).
As you can see below, Code Project has so far delivered 3,938 click-throughs over the previous 15 hours or so. I should note Brian’s OOF messages are 60% more popular than the post on Apple banning Adobe’s planned big feature for CS5, and 400% more popular than the SDTimes article on cloud computing or the CNET article on cyberattacks… (although only ~70% the clicks of the iPhone 4 OS article – showing that Brian’s god-like powers to draw traffic are more like a Greek demi-god, than an omnipotent judeau-christian style god).
Finally, click-throughs from my post to www.brianhprince.com seems to be ~12-17%, depending on log sample (e.g,. 475-675 UU today). For comparison, I’ve had about 234 views of all “other” pages on my blog today.
So what are the take-aways from all of this?
1. Appropriately, based on click-throughs, the pages on Brian’s blog site are probably doing more to impact the traffic generated by this post than are the pages on my site
2. Reading OOF messages is actually more interesting to a lot of people than learning about different types of cloud computing
3. But still not as interesting as the iPhone to a lot of folks
4. Brian is more like Hercules than Yahweh.
5. Sometimes you get lucky
Final thoughts on “scaling the success”
Since we work for Microsoft, this “After Action Report” would not be complete without some thoughts on how to extend and replicate this success more broadly. It would be tempting to think that we should just encourage our broad team to compose their future blog posts out of email snippets previously received from Brian Prince. I believe this strategy is a siren’s song: although it seems compelling at first glance based on it’s operational savings (especially labor/time savings) and clear actionability, the “derivative thinking” of this approach would soon become transparent to our communities and negatively impact our ongoing work to position Microsoft as an innovator. Instead, I believe a different path, based on hard work, will ultimately be more effective. Specifically, we should learn from the take-aways listed above and encourage our bloggers to be really apply themselves to the task of getting lucky. With practice and dedication, we can all be luckier. As Edna Molds famously said, “Luck favors the prepared, darling”. So we must prepare for luck. In an effort to lead by example, I will personally be spending much of my free time this weekend attempting to improve my luckiness factor in a measurable way (luckiness = # times was lucky / Total possible luck opportunities). The support of our leadership team is crucial, of course: one concrete way to support this strategy is to schedule our next off-site in either Las Vegas (if budgets allow), or a local Native American casino (if budgets necessitate), so that we can get a solid external validation of our luckiness at that future point in time. This insight will be critical to iterating and improving our ongoing luckiness-building activities.
And here is part of my response to his ‘after-action-report’:
Brilliant email John. I support your luck strategies. Many companies use this strategy, called LBA, or Luck Based Accounting. Or LBRP = “Luck Based Retirement Planning”, and the new developer fad, LDD = “Luck Driven Development”.