Connor Brooke“Email vs. Social Networks” has been a much debated topic for last few years. Some say e-mails will die just as telefax & snail mails however some say e-mails will never die since it has a multi-billion dollar industry built around it & people have vested interests to keep it alive.
Before mobile phones became the status symbol of the late 1990′s, there was the pager. Teenagers, doctors and executives all had them. However since mobile phones gained popularity pagers actually died & we do not see them anymore. Has snail mails & telefax really died?. Well, definitely not, they would have faded or the usage may have largely declined because of other communication methods but they still exist. I am sure we can instantly think of enterprises that still have fax numbers & also send snail mails to employees, customers, suppliers, etc.
E-Mails did not replace telefax & snail mails completely however helped in improving communication & replacing such old technologies to a very large extent. Similarly you may have already noticed that your email inbox today contains very few personal messages anymore. It has a lot of marketing newsletters from banks, insurance, e-commerce portals, etc., all of the electronic correspondence has gone elsewhere, you may be receiving more private messages at Facebook, Twitter, SMSes, IM’s, etc. than you do on your personal emails.
Enterprise Social network sites are still in infancy & haven’t gone through the school of hard knocks like email yet however we can strongly say enterprise social collaboration networks can eliminate the need for email within any organization for internal communication. When it comes to online communications, social networking has huge communities of people sharing information with each other. And its rise comes as people question email’s effectiveness. According to a report by ComScore, web-based email use among 12-17 year olds dropped 31% in the past year, while use among those 18 to 24 year old’s saw an even bigger drop of 34%. Some of that can no doubt be attributed to Facebook and other email alternatives; both of those age groups saw double-digit growth in that respect.
Gone are the days of using emails within organizations for communication & collaboration, subject lines and well-composed email messages. The young’ins are all about sending texts, IMs or posting status messages to get their message across to team members & colleagues.
Then is Email going the way of telefax, especially amongst Gen Y ? In short, no. atleast not in the near future for the 20% communication outside the organization, social will complement E-mail more than it replaces it. Businesses will use email primarily to communicate with potential customers and do deals. E-mail may not be replaced for sales since a salesperson cannot pitch on a social network until Social networks start talking to each other as Yahoo mail servers can talk to Gmail mail servers. But that doesn’t mean social networking is an insignificant trend. Email is one of the immense successes of the internet. It has helped revolutionize communications however everything fades away eventually. Email is cold and informal, not used by the next generation, spam remains an unwelcome occurrence, it is perceived as being slow due to expectation of faster & more responses, email is a poor model for communication.
Today email is the most commonly used tool to communicate & collaborate however for enterprises every minute counts. Operational efficiency is paramount. Achieving that efficiency requires the ability to monitor, analyze, and act on a growing volume of information, so you can make better decisions, faster.
Social collaboration network is quickly becoming the preferred solution for businesses, enabling users to share information and collaborate freely from any location, with any device, and with all privacy/security intact. We’ve compiled the most common reasons how Enterprise Social Networks can help over email:
- You can’t share a 2GB file over email
- You can’t find a colleague that is an expert on a specific topic via email
- You can’t review a co-worker’s background and experience on email
- Email doesn’t stimulate connections with co-workers across departments and geographies
- Email doesn’t automatically tell you when a co-worker is online or received file.
- Email doesn’t allow private team workspaces where all conversations, files, and tasks are automatically stored and updated
- You can’t get to know the faces of your co-workers on email.
- Email has spam. Lots of spam.
- It is viewed as rude to send an email copying colleagues asking a question on how to do or find something.
Social networks introduce an interesting new model of outreach and communications with lots of advantages over email. Try MangoApps for FREE & experience it yourself.
This article was written for Business 2 Community by Connor Brooke.
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Good article. I have two daughters (teens) and they are saying the same thing you are. “Dad, e-mail is for old people” I, too, would like e-mail to fade away as I view as, at best, I view it as a nuisance and worse, I feel enslaved to it. There is one challenge with collaboration tools that will be more difficult to overcome. There are too many of them. The day and age where you can have one standard collaboration tool that everyone uses. I know I use multiple tools and that is a challenge. I am sure that for companies like yours you would like everyone to agree to one standard – yours! I just don’t see that happening in this day and age.
Email is not dying, and a strong indication of that is that Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+ and almost every other network and community have *added* to the number, frequency and types of emails they send out. The amount of social network email I get is becoming equal to all the other email I get.
“Do you know…?”
“We found people similar to…”
“New discussion in…”
“New post from your connection…”
It is endless.
Email will not die, it will just be filtered and deleted.