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Email is Still King

Courtesy of derrickkwa

Courtesy of derrickkwa

What tools do you use on the internet?

Google? Flickr? Twitter? AIM? Blogs? Email? Something else I’m not thinking of at the moment?

When you get a message through one of these, how responsive are you?

Google? Probably not at all. Why? Because, it’s likely an ad, right?

Flickr? So, someone wants to be your friend, who cares?! It’s not really a community, and most people seem to realize that.

Twitter? It’s very interactive, but if you miss a tweet, do you really care? And, is it even built so that you can conveniently scroll through your overnight tweets? No. If you get the message while you’re around, you respond. If not, you just never get the message really.

AIM? If you’re not available, people can’t even leave you a message, so how responsive can you really be to them?

Blogs? Leaving a comment on a blog is kind of like leaving a voicemail. It’s understood that the person will get back to you, but everyone has his/her own definition of what an appropriate amount of time is, and most of the info on blogs is irrelevant to you anyway.

Email? Again, like blogs, it can take forever for some people to respond, but the huge difference between email and any of these other tools is that nearly everyone uses email, and if you’ve read a work productivity study in the last decade, you no doubt know how quickly most people respond to email and how much of their days it takes up.

When someone emails you, how often do you click on the links they send? Almost all of the time, right?

So, why aren’t you making more use of email to advertise yourself? To tell people about your new blog posts? To correspond with your network?

Just because Twitter, blogs, and whatever else are new, exciting, and fast does not mean that the largest, most useful crowds are gathered on those networks. They are still on email, and you should be too.

If you run a blog, you need to have an email subscription option. If you’re on Linkedin, you need to email your contacts every now and then to check in. [HINT: Email necessitates a response in almost all cases.] If you’re a marketer, networker, job hunter, or just a connecter, you need to email people if you want to form any in depth connections online.

If you send someone a link, they will click on it, and that means more blog pageviews, more eyes on your resume, or maybe even just more people looking at your beautiful face on Flickr.

If you have questions about how to best use email, ask. The community has the answers.

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This entry was posted on Monday, December 15th, 2008 at 4:33 pm and is filed under Blogs, Ideas, Twitter, social media, social networking. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

  • @ericpratum I really liked this: http://bit.ly/7YVN - in general, what do you think good #email response time is?
  • For all of my social networks, I have the email notifications turned off, but I do have each one set to open in a separate tab when I click the home button so that, even if I'm not spending time looking around them, I can still quickly check if anyone has tried to contact me.

    I guess that I did overlook where FB and other networks could be going. I suppose that a major coup might be for a social network to integrate regular email such that I can send and receive emails with people, who are not members of FB for example, right?

    I have yet to download it, but it sounds like the iPhone app Pinger might be getting closer to something like this level of integration.
  • I'm as giddy as Brandon that Facebook is becoming a viable communication platform. Email is threads of noise, unmanageable to many and based on paradigms decades old. However, I would propose another role for email - not as the king or casualty, but as the glue of social media. That's all.

    And as much as even I'd like to see email evolve or become extinct, there's a bigger picture over usage patterns that need to be addressed before any social network site replaces email:

    1) All sites will have to stop using email for notifications, registrations and identity verification.

    At last week's Insider's Summit, Jay Stevens, VP, Online Marketing, International, MySpace said: : “I laugh at the idea that social media is killing email. We’re the biggest users out there.”
    http://budurl.com/3mdw

    Everyone even uses Facebook differently, and there are those I still know that reply on email notifications of wall postings, message replies, etc. It will be another 30 years before they die off, unless a better method is developed and adopted. Personally, I just direct my notifications to an Otherinbox account, just to check and see if I've missed anything the last time I've logged in, and you know, every so often it catches a few.

    2) Social networks will have to manage messages better than Gmail. Right now, none of them do, because at the time messaging was an afterthought and the equivalent of two tin cans connected to string did the job of connecting people.

    Yahoo!, however, just announced what is a baby step of integrating email into the social space with their revamped Yahoo!Mail welcome:
    http://budurl.com/sqng

    Basically, the social sites aren't vested into really integrating email, so Yahoo!'s making it come to them. It's the confluence and equilibrium of these ideas that will form the future, something that you or I would have never thought of or agreed to:)

    Speaking as a GenX who helped build GenY, what happens after GenZ - should we just go back to the start of the alphabet, like we name hurricanes? That's another thread.
  • Every morning I catch up on tweets that I have missed while sleeping. You forgot Facebook, which has seemed to replace both AIM with its chat and traditional e-mail with Facebook's messaging platform.

    With that said, e-mail messaging may be king for the Generation Y, but Generation Z is the future.
  • I recently came accross your blog and have been reading along. I thought I would leave my first comment. I dont know what to say except that I have enjoyed reading. Nice blog. I will keep visiting this blog very often.

    Kate

    http://educationonline-101.com
  • I really liked your blog. Very useful information, I read it detail, also book-marked it and will be back in the future to read some more of your interesting posts ! keep up the good work. :)
  • I can't believe I'm the only bozo making comments on this - Eric's brought up a dirty truth that a lot on the social media Powerpoint circuit won't cop to: social media activities total 60% in the US, email usage is still at 90%. There are still folks we're going to have to reach out to with a 35-year old medium just to get them on Twitter.

    Even though my Piledriver clients think that most of our other social media consulting is super sexy, they also realize that they haven't even aced and optimized their email to the fullest extent. That's why we had to bring them Dojobox. I laughlingly call it the "gateway drug", because one they can experience what it's like to communicate, segment, and analyze an email campaign, then they feel better taking the baby steps into widgets, blogs, RSS, profiles, community crowdsourcing and all sorts of crazy stuff.

    As with all controlled substances, the tools in your social media toolbox need to be used responsibly. And only if you deliver something relevant, actionable and worthwhile. Richard Walter, who teaches screenwriting at UCLA, admonishes his students to "write like ink costs a million dollars an ounce". Due to inflation, I'd love to charge five times that per drop, and that would bring the lustre of rusty old email back. Right now, it's just being used as a batch-n-blast by most of your competition. This is where you can outperform.
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