Photo by Pinar Ozger, pinarozger.com

“Some businesses literally threw me out of the meeting five minutes in when they realized I asked them to move their emails outside of their firewall,” remembered Google’s  Rajen Sheth at GigaOM’s Net:Work conference in San Francisco Thursday. Sheth is known as the father of Google Apps, and he told his audience Thursday that establishing these apps what a bit of an uphill battle.

Even Google’s executives initially didn’t believe in the idea, and it took months to finally get the approval for one single engineer. Seven years later, Chrome Google Apps have evolved into a huge success story with four million business customers.

However, Sheth already has his next battle picked: He is now Group Product Manager of Chrome for Business at Google, and in this role is trying to sell Chromebooks to enterprise customers. “I feel like it’s a déjà-vu,” he said when asking about the challenges around establishing the device in the enterprise world. Some people already get it, he said, others aren’t quite there yet.

Google officially introduced the Chromebook at its Google I/O conference in May, and is charging enterprises $28 per month and device. Sheth said that Google wants to do to the desktop with Chromebooks what it did with Apps for enterprise IT. The upside for webworkers and companies alike is that the individual device matters much less than before. “We want to get to a point where any device is your device,” he said, adding that he doesn’t even carry a computer anymore. “I know when I log into my Chromebook at home its the same as my Chromebook at work,” he explained.

So how can Google win this battle and repeat the success of Google Apps? Sheth said that the product is continuously getting better, and also implied that there could be products other than laptops and the workstations currently available. “We are building it as a generic operating system,” he said, explaining that it would be up to the CE partners to come up with compelling form factors.

Photo by Pinar Ozger.

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Beginning November 22, 2011, we will end support for the Gmail App for BlackBerry (installed native app). Over this past year, we’ve focused efforts on building a great Gmail experience in the mobile browser and will continue investing in this area. Users may continue to use the app, if installed, however it will not be supported by Google, or available for download starting November 22.

I am guessing they want us to use the “exchange” equivalent for logging into Google Mail for Business, but for me, it was a great way to use personal Gmail account in an easy and efficient manner. Others too are lamenting Google’s move.

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Yet earlier this year, when Google interviewed its employees about what they valued most at work, none of these extravagant benefits made the top of the list. Neither did salary. Instead, employees cited access to “even-keeled bosses who made time for one-on-one meetings, who helped people puzzle through problems by asking questions, not dictating answers, and who took an interest in employees’ lives and careers.”

Tangibles like salary and benefits aren’t enough to guarantee that your best and brightest creatives will remain engaged. Indeed, a recent landmark study by Arnold Worldwide of 3,000 employees and 500 executive leaders across a range of communication and advertising firms found that 30 percent of the advertising workforce say they’ll be gone from their job within 12 months.

Take Jill, an outstanding, experienced copy editor whom Agency X recently recruited at considerable expense from one of its chief rivals. Despite her outward success, she’s unsure how she’s performing, where she stands in the company, and how she fits into the overall goals of the agency. Her pay is great, she loves the Friday office happy hour, but over time, she finds herself feeling demotivated by the lack of communication, and checks out.

The loss of star performers like Jill doesn’t just leave a talent vacuum to fill; it also leaves a gaping hole in the bottom line. Indeed, a recent article in the Wall Street Journal calculated that it typically costs a company about half a position’s annual salary to recruit for that job ¾ and several times that if the position requires rare skills.

So how can your company keep its stars engaged? It comes down to creating a culture of communication — one in which employees know where the organization is headed, how they fit into these plans, and what’s expected of them. Here are a few key strategies your agency can employ to make this happen.

1. Create a culture of education

The average Starbucks barista gets more training in a year than the average employee in a communications company, according to the Arnold Worldwide study.

For employees, the single most important motivational factor was the ability to learn. Yet the study found a huge disconnect when it comes to perceptions about company training. While 90 percent of employees say they learn by figuring things out on their own, only 25 percent of executives think that employees learn independently.

To keep employees motivated, agencies need to build a culture of learning, where employees leave more enriched at the end of each day.

2. Provide regular, consistent feedback

Employee feedback is a critical part of the education process, and shouldn’t just be relegated to the annual review. To be effective, feedback needs to be specific and actionable. But that’s not always how it works.

In a study by Leadership IQ, 53 percent of employees said that when their boss praises excellent performance, the feedback does not provide enough useful information to help them repeat it. And 65 percent responded that when their boss criticizes poor performance, it doesn’t provide enough useful information to help them correct the issue.

Feedback, both positive and constructive, is most effective when given right away. Negative feedback given a month after the fact can lead to a passive-aggressive environment in which an employee feels powerless to act on the advice.

Think of it this way: no one wants to go a full day knowing their price tag was hanging from the back of their shirt, or the remnants of the salad they had for lunch were still stuck in their teeth. If an employee does something well, that activity should be encouraged. And if there’s room for improvement, they should be given the opportunity to learn for their next task.

3. Set time aside for weekly 1:1 meetings

At first, most employees and managers will cringe at the idea of yet another meeting. But instituting weekly 1:1 meetings can be the most important step you take to retaining your top performers.

In its quest to build a better boss, Google discovered that its worst managers weren’t consistent in their 1:1 meetings; some focused on meeting with people who were underperforming, while others met primarily with the top performers.

Consequently, Google implemented the best practice of 1:1 meetings with all team members.

These meetings can cover anything and everything from upcoming projects to the latest client news. With each week, discussions about goals, feedback, and concerns become a lot more natural unlike the awkward, starchy conversations during annual reviews. Over time, it becomes easier for both sides to raise potential problems and deal with them early on, before they fester into something destructive.

4. Manage the grunt work properly

Not every project is going to be awesome. That’s just the way business works. And chances are your employees understand this.

However, managers need to handle such projects responsibly and that means a few things. Boring projects should always be balanced with more stimulating work. Employees should always be told how any grunt works fits into the overall needs of the company (“If we do a good job on x, we’re hoping the client will give us their cool launch next year”). And specific parameters should always be set for the boring stuff ¾ meaning employees should always see light at the end of the tunnel.

5. Publicly acknowledge good work

All too often, managers see motivation in terms of financial compensation, but money is far from the only way to effectively reward talented employees. A 2009 survey by McKinsey Quarterly asked which incentives were the most effective in motivating employees. The top two responses were: “Praise and commendation from immediate manager” (67 percent), and “Attention from leaders” (62 percent).

Praise and commendation go a long way in making employees feel noticed and valued. And the impact of a pat on the back is multiplied when it’s done publicly. Through public commendations, employees not only feel the support and respect of their manager, but the entire organization as well (including top-level executives). Creating a framework for “social recognition” will encourage a culture of appreciation throughout your firm.

Keeping your rockstar employees on board has always been important, and don’t think that economic uncertainty will keep your employees around. Your company has worked hard to recruit some bright people and great talent; make sure an opaque work environment doesn’t drive them into the arms of your competition.

Learn more about how to keep remote workers happy and your team collaborating at GigaOM’s Net:Work event on December 8, 2011.

Daniel Debow is co-founder and co-CEO of Rypple, a social performance management platform.

Image courtesy of Flickr user Esparta. 

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Specifically, Striebeck is asking for help with three questions:

• What email features would make it easier to interact with Google+?
• How could Google integrate Google+ features into Gmail?
• How can Google integrate social concepts in Gmail to make the email experience itself better?

If you’d like to provide your input, you can either join in a brainstorming discussion using Google+’s built-in video chat tool, Hangouts, on Tuesday, July 12 at 3pm PDT (although given the number of comments on Streibeck’s post already, I think it may be pretty popular and difficult to get into), or leave your thoughts in a shared Google Doc (you’ll need to ask Streibeck for access).

It will be interesting to see whether Striebeck can use Google’s own tools (Google+, Hangouts and Docs) to successfully gather the community feedback he’s looking for here, particularly as Hangouts is limited to ten simultaneous connections. But it does demonstrate that Google+ can be used as a collaboration tool, and underscores how Google+ may yet find a home in the workplace.

Personally, I’d like to see email notifications in Google+, and also to use profile information from my Circles to populate my address book in Gmail. What social features from Google+ would you like to see added to Gmail?

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• The Future of Work Platforms: An Overview
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While Facebook and Twitter have been massively successful in the consumer space, they’re not really suited for use in the workplace, as they make it difficult to keep personal and work-related information separate, and few companies would be happy about the possibility of potentially confidential information being broadcast to the world. Google, however, has produced an app that’s much more suited for use in the workplace by building Google+ around its Circles feature, which enables users to limit the sharing of information to specific groups of people, and by incorporating some very useful built-in collaboration features.

Circles, effortless contact management

Google+ is a lot like Facebook, offering users the ability to connect to other users, post status updates, share links and photos, and so on. But where it differs from apps like Facebook is its use of Circles, which allows users to define groups of contacts and then only share specific updates and other information with that group. Circles are effectively easy-to-understand privacy controls. They can be set up via an intuitive drag-and-drop interface, and there doesn’t appear to be any limitations on the number of them you can define.

You could, for instance, have a Circle for all of your work colleagues, a Circle for your team and then also create ad hoc Circles for project teams as required. This ability to easily control who you share specific pieces of information with is powerful, and very useful in the workplace: you may only want to send an update regarding the status or a project to only those colleagues working on that project, for example.

Facebook has tried to give users a similar degree of control over contact management with its Lists feature, but it’s clunky and nowhere near as well-implemented or as central to the experience as Circles is; while Google + is effectively  built on top of Circles, Facebook’s Lists feature feels like an afterthought.

As Google+ is a general-purpose social networking tool, a user can connect with any other Google+ user. This means that, unlike with many of the private enterprise social networking apps like Yammer, Jive, tibbr, Socialtext and Salesforce Chatter, people can use the app to easily communicate and collaborate with people outside of their organization — contractors or clients, for example.

Hangouts, Google+’s killer app for remote teams

Hangouts is Google+’s built-in multi-user video chat tool. It allows users to chat with up to ten people simultaneously and it’s really well implemented. Unlike other video chat apps, where you generally have to ping the other people you want to chat with on IM or email, get them to open their video chat client and then connect with them, Hangouts enables you to “hang out” in a video chat room, advertising your availability to chat to your contacts. If no-one else is around, you can leave it running in the background.

It’s all browser-based, so the user doesn’t have to fire up another app, and allows for much more spontaneous and effortless collaboration than other video chat app I’ve tried. I think it could potentially come close to replicating an “in office” experience for remote teams, allowing for the virtual equivalent of wandering up to a colleague’s desk to discuss a problem, or the traditional “water cooler” social chat.

Hangouts has an intuitive interface: Whoever is currently talking is highlighted in the large central window, with everyone else displayed in  strip of smaller windows underneath. In my testing, it works really well, with little lag. There’s a built-in IM feature for sharing links and so on, and also a YouTube feature, which enables users to share the watching of YouTube videos (which is neat, but probably not all that useful in the workplace). As Om noted, Hangouts is group video chat done right. It’s much better than Skype’s somewhat clunky group video chat feature, it’s free, and as it’s standards-based, it could be integrated into other applications, too (if you’re curious, Janko has written an interesting overview of the standards-based tech used to build the service).

Hangouts isn’t Google+’s only collaboration tool. It also features a built-in group texting feature called Huddle (see Stacey’s review here), which is currently only available on Android handsets.

Keep your team up-to-date with Sparks

Another great feature that differentiates Google+ from Facebook is Sparks. It lets users define an interest (robotics, for example), and then trawls the web looking for articles related to that interest, making it easy for users to find relevant articles to share. This could be useful in the workplace for research or keeping abreast of industry news, for example, helping users to stay up-to-date with topics of interest to them and their team, and then easily share and discuss any particularly interesting bits of information.

Why Google+ isn’t the perfect enterprise social-networking tool — yet

While Google + is well designed and has a lot of really great features, it’s not the perfect enterprise social networking tool just yet; it’s got a way to go before companies like Yammer and Salesforce should begin to really worry. Firstly, as Mathew noted, it needs users. Google+ is still in beta, but even after it launches to the general public, even if Google is massively successful in getting new users to sign up it will be a while before Google+ can get anywhere near rivaling Facebook’s numbers.

Secondly, Google+ isn’t yet set up to work with Google Apps accounts, which precludes a large number of potential enterprise users from using it with their main work email accounts. However, it’s probably safe to assume that Google+ will be made available to users of Google Apps soon — and the prospect of integrated social features in Google Apps powered by Google+ is a tantalizing one.

Finally, although Circles is an easy to use and intuitive way for users to determine who they share specific bits of share information with, it’s not perfect: there have already been reported privacy concerns with Google+ and Circles, with updates being forwarded on (or “reshared”) beyond the original Circle it was intended for. Google is being responsive to the concerns and is now addressing that particular issue, so hopefully any lingering privacy concerns will be ironed out before the product sees a more widespread release.

Of course, as Jess noted earlier today, the success of enterprise social networking tools depends on much more than just the technology itself. But Google’s latest foray into the social space is very well designed and offers a a great range of features. Assuming the company can tackle any privacy concerns that pop up and can persuade enough users to join the service and give it the initial traction it needs, Google+ could well become entrenched in the workplace.

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UPDATE: GoDropBox has been renamed GoFileDrop.

GoDropBox is a nifty third-party add-on for Google Apps that adds a public mailbox to your Google Docs account, enabling anyone with the appropriate link to upload files to your account. This is handy for web workers who would like to accept files that are too big to email and don’t want to have to use additional file transfer tools.

Once installed via the Google Apps Marketplace, you’ll be given a unique URL that you can then forward to other people, which allows them to upload files to your Google Docs account through their browser (they can only upload files and don’t have the ability to read or otherwise access your account). The upload page is fairly basic, as shown in the screenshot above. It is easy to use and supports drag and drop, allows batch file uploads and can show upload progress. Uploaded files appear immediately in your Google Docs account.

The installed version of GoDropBox is only a trial, offering up to 100 users on a domain just 50 MB of data allowance each. Additional data is priced at $5 for 2 GB per month, $9 for 5 GB per month, or $15 for 10 GB per month (subscriptions can be canceled at any time).

Note: Confusingly, despite the name, this has absolutely nothing to do with file-sync-and-sharing service Dropbox. Also, in order to use it, you’ll have to be a Google Apps user and an admin will have to install it on your domain.

(via Digital Inspiration)

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Signup and Setup

Office 365 is relatively straightforward to set up, only requiring users to enter a few details; you don’t need to be an experienced IT admin to get going.  After signing up with Office 365, it takes a little while for Office 365 to bring online the hosted instances of Exchange and SharePoint, but the whole process takes less than ten minutes. With Google Apps you’ll need your own domain and will have to verify it (Office 365 will provide one for you), which means that setup is more involved and will probably take a little longer, but there is a wizard to help step you through it.

Admin page/Dashboard

The Office 365 admin page has options for managing users and passwords, websites, and for managing your Office 365 subscription. Google Apps has a similar Dashboard page, which also allows admins to add additional apps from third-party vendors via the Google Apps Marketplace.

Email

Office 365 provides Outlook Web App, which has a very familiar interface for users of the Outlook desktop app. Google Apps uses Gmail.

Calendar

Word processing

Spreadsheets

Presentations

Note that you cannot edit presentations with Google Apps, only view them.

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Office 365 is not Microsoft’s first attempt at offering this kind of service; it has previously offered hosted Exchange and SharePoint services with BPOS (Business Productivity Online Services). But by including Office Web Apps in Office 365, the company now has a much more rounded product that enables users to do their work anywhere, on any device, and to easily collaborate with others.

Office 365 vs. Google Apps for Business

One of Office 365′s main advantages over Google Apps is the huge existing installed user base of Office products. Office is entrenched in the majority of businesses worldwide, and Office 365 offers an easy pathway for those users to migrate to cloud collaboration while using familiar tools. Office 365 also has a greater range of features than Google Apps, incorporating office productivity (Office and Office Web Apps), collaboration and intranet tools (SharePoint Online), email and calendars (Exchange Online) and instant messaging and web conferencing (Lync Online).

Unlike some previous Microsoft releases, Office 365 works cross-platform, so it can be accessed equally via Mac and PC and on mobile devices — although there are reports that mobile access from some devices is limited. Office Web Apps, in particular, is an impressive suite of products, and while they aren’t complete cloud-based replacements for the desktop Office apps — they don’t offer the full range of functionality that desktop apps do — Microsoft obviously invested a lot of effort in making the user experience very similar. The interface is familiar, and documents look identical in Office Web Apps and in the desktop applications. By enabling seamless round-trip working between Office Web Apps and Office desktop applications, Office 365 can also work when users are offline, something that can’t be said of Google Apps.

Of course, Google believes that its product is superior. On Monday, in a post titled “365 reasons to consider Google Apps” on the official Google Enterprise blog, Google Apps Product Manager Shan Sinha aimed a few barbs at Office 365, saying that it is designed for usage by individuals, not by teams; that its pricing is complex; and that Office 365 doesn’t have proven cloud reliability, while Google Apps has a record of 99.9 percent uptime. Some of Sinha’s points are debatable: Office 365 does enable co-editing and collaboration, for example, and Microsoft has plenty of experience in offering cloud-based services, even if Office 365 itself is new.

Easy migration to cloud productivity for existing Office users

With its higher price point, Office 365 might not tempt existing corporate users of Google Apps for Business away, particularly as migrating between the two services is unlikely to be straightforward. However, that’s probably not the market that Microsoft is aiming at. Rather, it wants to keep hold of the huge numbers of business customers with existing investments in the Office product line. For them, Office 365 is a well-designed product that offers an easy migration route to cloud-based office productivity at a reasonable price point with products that will feel very familiar to their users. I think that will make Office 365 a compelling proposition for many business customers, in particular smaller businesses that would like to offer their employees the ability to work and collaborate remotely using familiar Microsoft tools but don’t want to have to make an upfront investment in, and then maintain, their own SharePoint and Exchange servers.

Office 365 is available on a number of different plans, starting at around $6 per user per month for small businesses with less than 25 users; enterprise customers have access to plans including dedicated support. For comparison, Google Apps for Business costs around $4 per month.

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Appointment slots are shown on a booking page, which you can embed on a website or share with colleagues or clients. People visiting that page will then have their own personal calendar overlaid over the available appointment slots and can click to book a time; a shared calendar event is then created for both users.

Here’s a short screencast showing how to set up appointment slots and how the booking process works:

Google Calendar’s appointment slots are easy to use and should greatly streamline the process of booking appointments, eliminating email back-and-forth. However, unlike dedicated meeting scheduling tools like TimeTrade, Tungle and Setster, which also offer this kind of appointment-booking functionality but only require the person advertising their availability to sign up for the app, Google’s feature requires both the person broadcasting their availability and the person booking the appointment to use Google Calendar. So while appointment slots will probably be very useful within companies where everyone is using Google Apps, it’s not going to be suitable for, say, a personal trainer offering appointment bookings on a publicly accessible website.

Note: While I have access to the appointment slots feature on my Google Apps account, I don’t yet see it on my personal Google Calendar, so it may be that it hasn’t been rolled out to all users yet.

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The first time you click the icon, you’ll be asked for your login details before being taken to your inbox. Eagle-eyed users of the mobile-optimized version of Gmail for the iPhone will probably be very familiar with the version of the web app that pops up; it looks like Mailbox is effectively just a browser window, and the app is tricking Google into thinking that it is serving the site to a mobile device. That’s not necessarily a bad thing: the iPhone-optimized version of Gmail is nicely-designed, provides access to Gmail’s more advanced features (Priority Inbox, Google Buzz, labels, stars, etc.) and works well on smaller displays — like the window that Mailbox uses to display your inbox on your desktop.

As a very simple, lightweight app that provides speedy desktop access to your Gmail account via your menu bar, it works pretty well. However, if you’re a Google Apps for Domains Gmail user, you’re out of luck: unfortunately, it doesn’t seem to work properly with those accounts. Additionally, there are a couple of extra (albeit probably technically hard to implement) features that would turn it from merely being a convenient way to access the Gmail website into a much more useful application. Robust offline access would be really handy, and make the app more of an equivalent to full-featured desktop email clients like Outlook and Apple Mail. Some kind of notifications system for new and unread emails would also be useful — perhaps having a count of unread emails next to the app’s icon in the menu bar, and also having the option of Growl notifications for new emails.

Mailbox can be downloaded from the App Store. It’s free, and requires Mac OS X 10.6 or later

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With Office 365, Microsoft is taking aim squarely at Google’s cloud-based business productivity suite, Google Apps for Business. Both sets of tools appeal to the small business market, and offer similar “work anywhere” cloud functionality and an ecosystem of related tools through their marketplaces. Despite Google having had a considerable head start in this market and having a much larger ecosystem of partner apps in its marketplace, Microsoft has the advantage of a strong brand in Office, a comparatively powerful of set of online tools in Office Web Apps, and a huge installed userbase for its desktop apps. Businesses that have already invested heavily in Microsoft products for the desktop will likely find the familiarity of Office 365 appealing, particularly as it offers the functionality of Sharepoint and Exchange for a low monthly subscription fee without requiring any upfront investment in hardware, software licenses or staff.

Office 365 includes:

• Office Web Apps. Online versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote.
• Sharepoint Online. Intranet and collaboration tools.
• Exhange Online. Email and calendars.
• Lync Online. Unified communications, including IM and web conferencing.

If you’d like to try it out, you can sign up for the beta at the Office 365 site for a 25-user account (for businesses with more than 25 users, Microsoft offers enterprise plans, including dedicated support). Note that Microsoft currently anticipates the average wait for a new account from sign-up as being approximately two to four weeks during the beta period. When the beta ends, which is likely to happen later this year, users will have 30 days to decide whether to migrate to paid subscription, which should start at $6 per user per month. For comparison, Google charges $50 per user per year for Google Apps for Business, or around $4 per month.

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You can disable contacts auto-save in the “Create contacts for auto-complete” section of General tab of the Setting screen, as shown in the screenshot below.

Note that Gmail uses your contacts list to auto-complete email addresses as you type them in the address fields, so if you disable auto-saving, you’ll need to make sure that you manually add any email addresses that you’d like auto-completed.

Other useful changes to the product include better warnings for typos in email addresses and letting you know which email address contains the error; a reduction in annoying pop-up messages; and easier access to keyboard shortcuts — the Shift+? shortcut, which brings up a keyboard guide overlay, is now turned on by default, and also includes a link to enable the other keyboard shortcuts.

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Users will be able to start with a new home section, where they can access frequently used documents. There’s also a new collections features which replaces labels and folders and allows users to organize documents for easy sharing and editing. Google has included a new preview panel for viewing videos and seeing thumbnails of documents. Pictures can be opened in a full screen viewer. Priority sorting builds off Gmail’s priority in-box and pulls the most important documents to the top.

There are additional filters to view document types. Now users can filter for videos and images and can apply filters for public and private documents. Google has also sped up the back end for faster performance, streamlined the interface overall and included new keyboard short cuts. The changes show that Google is able to iterate well and make things cleaner and more usable, if not the first time, eventually over successive updates. Improvements to Docs are important if Google wants to become a viable alternative to Microsoft’s productivity tools.

Google has recently enabled document editing on mobile devices. The company also released Google Cloud Connect, allowing users to begin a document in Microsoft Word, Excel or Powerpoint and then with a click of the button, share the document on the web via Google Docs. The latest update, which will roll out over the next couple of days, is not ground-breaking but it continues to help position Google Docs to better compete against Microsoft Office.

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Priority Inbox, which attempts to deliver the most relevant emails to the top of a user’s inbox screen, combines the behaviors of all Gmail users with your personal preferences and behaviors to deliver an inbox where your most important mail gets read first.

It’s as if your doctor could compare your physical complaints with all of the symptoms experienced by people everywhere in the world, in order to deliver a diagnosis in a few seconds. Not impressive if you have a cold, but if you suffer from a rare disorder, it’s amazing. The paper is chock full of math and explanations of how Google does this at scale (sharding databases and using Bigtable across tens of thousands of servers), but the crux of the matter is Google trying to apply machine learning to determine what each Priority Inbox user cares most about. To do that requires a computer connected to the cloud, and Google’s back-end servers. It’s an illustration of how massive computing power in the cloud and a client device can interact in ways that benefit users.

The biggest challenge isn’t necessarily the huge data crunching on the back end; it’s accounting for what the paper’s authors and statisticians call “noise,” and what I call the oh-so-human tendency to do what we want, not what’s most productive. For example, in email, we waste a lot of time and productivity opening silly emails about Lindsay Lohan’s latest escapades while ignoring those from our boss:

Opening a mail is a strong signal of importance for our metric, but many users open a lot of mail that is “interesting” rather than “important”. Also, unlike spam classification, users do not agree on the cost of a false positive versus a false negative. Our experience showed a huge variation between user preferences for volume of important mail, which can not be correlated with their actions.”

The challenge for machine learning is to calculate the signal from the noise on a massive scale in real-time, so your LiLo emails get sent to the bottom of the stack, but can still be read.

The researchers say that for Googlers who receive similar volumes of mail, Priority Inbox users spend 6 percent less time reading mail overall, and 13 percent less time reading unimportant mail. So while Priority Inbox may end up making you more productive, you might have less to chat about at the virtual water cooler. Unless you use those time savings to hang out on Twitter.

Do you use Priority Inbox? Do you think it makes you more productive?

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1. Advanced Segments

Don’t feel limited by looking at your data through the segments that Google Analytics defines as defaults. While all visitors, new visitors, and returning visitors are certainly interesting, you should try defining some of your own. I have created a segment for looking at the behavior of frequent visitors, meaning visitors who have come to the site 5 or more times in particular time frame. It’s possible to compare such a custom segment with other segments, so I can see if frequent visitors spend more or less time on the site, and visit fewer or more pages than new visitors, or other returning visitors.

You can create some very detailed segments, too. For example, I created two test segments: both are from Western Europe, but one segment is Firefox users, and the other is Chrome users. I compared the two, and found that people from Western Europe using Firefox spent more time on my site and visited more pages. You can even use these advanced segments on the custom reports that I mentioned in my previous post.

You can define a custom segment by going to the “My Customizations” box and selecting “Advanced Segments.” Once you have an advanced segment defined, an “Advanced Segments” drop-down menu will appear in the gray bar at the top of your reports.

2. Navigation Summary

The Navigation Summary lets you look at any page on your website, to find out what page they came from, and what page they went to next. This provides interesting information about whether key pages are fulfilling their purpose.

For example, my blog has a “Starting Point” page that was designed to help people find articles that I’ve written. The Navigation Summary shows that from my Starting Point page, most people go to my page on Yahoo Pipes and RSS Hacks. I suspect this is because of the way the navigation on the page is designed; I can use the analytics data to reorganize the navigation to make my content easier to find.

You can get to the Navigation Summary by visiting the “Content Overview” page and clicking on “Navigation Summary” in the right column, underneath the graph. On the Navigation Summary page, select the “Content” drop-down box to see navigation data for any page. Dennis Graham has written an in-depth explanation of some other interesting ways to use this data.

3. Views

Detailed data in Google Analytics is shown as a table by default, but you can also see the data as a percentage pie chart, performance bar chart, comparison chart, or even a pivot table with all kinds of interesting data about your visitors. For example, a pivot table could be used to compare visitors from Google in Asia who are new or returning.

Looking at a pivot table of my top content, it was interesting to see that people who land on certain pages from Twitter spend much less time on the page than people who arrived from some of the other sources.

To access the various views, go to any page with a table and look under the right side of the top graph or just above a table to find a “Views” section with five icons representing your different views.

What are your favorite Google Analytics tips?

Related content from GigaOM Pro (sub. req.):

• Enabling the Web Work Revolution
• Report: The Real-Time Enterprise
• Social Media in the Enterprise

To get started, just head to the Shared Spaces gallery, pick the gadget you’d like to use and click “Create a Space.” You’ll be asked to log in using a Google, Twitter or Yahoo account before being sent to your space. The bulk of the window is taken up by the gadget (like the whiteboard in the image above), with a chat pane situated at the bottom of the window. To invite anyone else into your space, you just send them the URL.

There are gadgets available for a range of basic tasks, such as drawing on a whiteboard, creating a poll, picking a suitable date for a meeting, getting feedback on ideas, creating mind maps and much more. Shared Spaces is free to use.

Related content from GigaOM Pro (sub. req.):

• Enabling the Web Work Revolution
• Report: The Real-Time Enterprise
• Who Owns Your Data in the Cloud?