I’m a big believer in the idea of ethnographic research.  I think immersing yourself into the world of your audience is much more powerful than focus groups, surveys and other “research” tools.  Of late, there’s been a great deal of emphasis being paid to “Digital Ethnographies.”  I won’t get into a lot of depth about Digital Ethnographies.  This paper does a fantastic job of providing a lot of background on the subject matter.  Here’s a great passage that offers a high level overview of Digital Ethnographies…the last line is particularly powerful.

In essence, Digital Ethno is the modern, digital equivalent of traditional, Malinowskian ethno-graphic forms. The critical distinction is that while traditional ethnographers physically immerse themselves in distinct places and their cultures, digital ethnographers capitalize on wired and wireless technologies to extend classic ethnographic methods, like participant observation, beyond geographic, as well as temporal, boundaries. This method is ideally suited to documenting the fluidity and flexibility already distinguishing contemporary cultures and communities. Participants communicate their experience via the Internet and other digital technologies. Digital ethnographers gather these details, whether they’re in the form of words, images, or audio files, and determine their significance as they are played out in the context of participants’ lives.

I think one of the most powerful sources of insight sources we can leverage is the inbox. What an inbox could tell us is amazing. For example if you looked at my inbox you’d find an insanely well organized folder structure. Everything is placed into a place, that’s then folded into another place, that’s then folded into another place. Things are organized by topics of interest, years, months, etc. and of course it’s all alphabetical. You’ll also find that there’s nothing in my actual inbox because I have a serious case of OCD. I can’t go to bed until my inbox is empty. It simply weighs on me. You won’t find any personal emails mixed in with my work email account, nor will you find any work email mixed in with my personal email account. I keep them separate. You’ll find that 65% of my sent emails are to the same 8 people and that 75% of my received emails are from roughly the same 20 people.

That’s just a little glimpse. Imagine if you could see who my contacts were and what was in my calendar. Now imagine if you could see all my email from the dawn of time? You’d be able to see how my relationships changed, what things were important and the things I attended/did. In essence you would have an amazing insight into me.

If you’re a girl and all you have are emails and contacts that are guys, what does that say?  If you hold on to emails from exes what does that to say?  If you don’t put emails into folders or vice versa, what does that say?  What about about the content of your emails?  Are they friendly?  Short?  Detailed?  Filled with smiley faces and LOLs?  Are they flirty?  Serious?  Do you email frequently?  Are your emails mostly to the same people or do you spread it out?  Do you have a lot of email newsletters?  What about junk email?

Your inbox says a lot about you.  Give some thought to what would happen if you let someone rifle through your email history…read your emails, see who you contact, what events you attended…and if you use gMail, what you said to people via chats.

Pretty heavy, huh?