By Jenn Riggle
Photo courtesy of Poldavo (Alex)
We’re seeing the U.S. Postal Service reeling from the impact of social media. Whether it’s the popularity of online bill payments or the movement away from letter writing, “snail mail” just isn’t what it used to be – especially if it means the end of Saturday mail deliveries.
You have to wonder whether we’re going to see the same thing happen with e-mail. While social media may be sexy and have lots of new features and functionalities, e-mail continues to be the workhorse that drives businesses. In fact, many businesses (and hospitals) block their employees from accessing social networks at work.
It’s interesting to note that social media users are also some of the biggest e-mail users. The SherpaBlog looked at study conducted by Merkle, the customer relationship marketing agency, which showed that 75 percent of daily social media users said e-mail is the best way for companies to communicate with them. In addition, people who use social media check their e-mail more four times a day or more vs. 27 percent who don’t use social media. It’s clear that social media users aren’t turning their back on e-mail — in fact they just use it as another mode of communication.
The Economist cited a Robert Half Technology survey of 1,400 chief information officers that showed that only one-tenth of them gave employees full access to social networks during the day. The rest blocked or gave their employees limited access to social media. Of course, employees can always access social networks via their smartphones, even if they can’t access them via their computer. In fact, comScore reported that 30.8 percent of smartphone users accessed social networking sites in January 2010.
Not only does e-mail own the desktop, it’s the primary reason why people purchase the most popular smartphone – the Blackberry. According to comScore, Research in Motion’s Blackberry has 43 percent of the smartphone market, while Apple’s iPhone ranks second with 25.1 percent. A recent Advertising Age article described Blackberry as being primarily business users who want to access their e-mail – again proof that people are tied to their e-mail (whether they like it or not).
So maybe now isn’t time to put e-mail out to pasture:
- “E-mail is the First and Largest Social Network:” Facebook prides itself as being the largest social network with 400 million users, worldwide. However, according to Jeremiah Owyang from the Altimeter Group, e-mail is still the first and largest social network, with 1.4 billion e-mail users, worldwide in 2009.
- E-mail Owns the Corporate Desktop: There’s no disputing the fact that e-mail is a fixture of the business world and Gmail has become ubiquitous (kind of like AOL was in the 1990s). Corporate America runs on Microsoft Windows, so it’s hard to believe that it’s going away anytime soon.
- E-mail Makes It Easy to Share Information: While social media provides a great way to share information to a targeted audience quickly, it does so in a public forum. For sharing sensitive information, e-mail provides the ability do so privately.
Is e-mail overused? Definitely. We talk a lot about the plague of “management by e-mail,” where bosses feel the need to send an endless string of e-mails to their subordinates rather than pick up the phone. This behavior adds to the greater problem of overflowing Inboxes and lost and overlooked e-mails. It also adds to the consternation of your organization’s IT director, who has to back-up all of these e-mails.
Probably the greatest opportunity for social media is to help cut through this information overload and streamline communications. Twitter’s Direct Message (DM) function provides a great alternative to e-mail because it’s private and forces communications to be quick and to the point. The only caveat is that you and the person you DM need to be following each other.
We need to recognize that a lot of social media users are business users. And as long as businesses are still using e-mail, people are going to need to find a way to move within the social media and Windows worlds. It’s not a matter of using e-mail or social media – but finding a way to leverage them for what they do best.
Thanks Jenn. Some staggering stats that really drive your main pt home.
Email is not going anywhere and I’d be very interested to see if anyone outside the PR/social media world shares this opinion. I’ve heard rumblings about the death of it only inside the aforementioned fishbowl.
You are bang on about email’s distinct advantages. One, that I don’t think you explicitly mentioned (though it seemed implied) is the fact that we’ve been using it for awhile so now even grandma regularly sends messages via email. Certainly the 60 yr old CEO is more likely to be familiar with it than Facebook or Twitter.
Your pt re management through email is also important. I manage a remote team and the misunderstandings and screwups that come as a result of emails, Twitter DM’s, IM etc are a killer. This has been particularly acute amongst younger employees who’ve grown up with this stuff for most of their lives. The only around this has been to constantly remind employees that while email, twitter etc are great tools there nothing beats face to face or the phone as they provide much better opportunities for reflective listening.
Hi Jackson-
You’re right — PR and marketing folks are probably the biggest adopters of social media. But for us, it’s become a way of life. Like your point that everyone uses e-mail and that in many ways, it levels the playing field for people of all ages. Thanks so much for comments!
Email is here to stay. I use email daily. My clients still prefer email. We are in a transition toward more social media. The usage ratio will change as the tool ware expands. Here are five lessons we have learned in enterprise collaboration:
http://www.dynamicalsoftware.com/news/?p=85