• by Aaron Baar , May 3, 2011

People know they waste plenty of time at work on distracting emails that can be too long, off-topic or lead into endless meetings where nothing gets accomplished. Under the guise of helping businesses focus, Xerox has developed an application that gives people the opportunity to discover and analyze these distractions.

The company's Business of Your Brain desktop application, which is available free from the company's Web site, www.businessofyourbrain. com, takes information from a user's Microsoft Outlook account (it does not yet work with other email programs), reviewing emails and calendar notices to create a visual report outlining the activities, people, events and vocabulary that fill that user's inbox and day.

"It's meant to be something fun, lighthearted and unexpected from the Xerox brand. We want to change some of the legacy perceptions [of Xerox] in the space," Christa Carone, chief marketing officer of Xerox, tells Marketing Daily.

The app details the people with whom a user has the most meetings; which users send the most emails with "high-priority" exclamation points; buzzwords that populate email subject lines and noting who writes the longest emails.

"The idea is to point out the lack of focus throughout the day," Carone says. "We thought it would be fun to do a graphical representation of that time use."

The app is an outgrowth of the company's "Ready for Real Business" global marketing campaign, which has depicted familiar company mascots (such as Mr. Clean or the Target dog) trying to accomplish two jobs at the same time. The idea of the campaign is to show Xerox can do much of the back-office chores, freeing company executives up to focus on their business needs.

While the app does include some references to the company's Web site and positioning, the app's overall intent is to inject a little fun and playfulness into the business world. Accordingly, the company is relying on social and other interactive media to increase its viral potential, Carone says.

"We're pretty goal-based, and we'll have a good sense about whether we're reaching our goals or we need to turn up our paid media," she says.