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Is Email Dead?

At the Enterprise 2.0 conference in San Francisco, Clara Shih, CEO of Hearsay Labs and author of "The Facebook Era," explains how social web platforms, such as Twitter and Facebook, are impacting businesses. She says email is slowly being replaced by social networking applications -- a shift driven by young people.

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Tags: Facebook, Social Web, Social Networking, E-mail, Online Communications, Marketing, Advertising & Promotion, Twitter

 
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  •  
    1

    percychow

    11/05/09 | Report as spam

    Dead might be a bit premature...

    Email is the new "paper-trail"... especially when it comes to business commmunications.

    Although...Yes, I can see a business-centered-facebook type of format for collaboration. However, you'd need root level adoption within the organization and also an upper management willing to pry themselves away from habit.

  •  
    2

    PatJ

    11/05/09 | Report as spam

    RE: Is Email Dead?

    Based on her presentation, I can only imagine that she was allowed no prep time time and was forced to read messages on her teleprompter because her loved ones are being held hostage.

  •  
    3

    wdoel

    11/05/09 | Report as spam

    RE: Is Email Dead?

    Email was replaced by texting with young people. Email is still the principal form of business communication and is likely to remain that way for the foreseeable future.

  •  
    4

    vivekananda7

    11/05/09 | Report as spam

    RE: Is Email Dead?

    In other words, is communication with well formed thoughts in complete sentences dead? Perhaps there remains a place for communication in complete sentences.

  •  
    5

    conlad

    11/06/09 | Report as spam

    RE: Is Email Dead?

    The future is collaboration. That entails neither facebook nor pure email as we have known. I think it goes more along the new online apps (Google Apps, Office Online) that allow for seamless, real time integration (and so, no more back-and-forth emails changing the same document) and tools that integrate mail, messaging, exploring and file exchange/viewer. Email will simply see its role diminished but will still remain as the messaging center across the business, and the main one with customers, specially for the important communications (I'd not send a sales agreement, for example, via Instant Messaging. You'd have no tracing, backlog, hardcopy or anything else).

    And yes, google Wave does sound like that, and I can well see a Collaboration Suite built like Wave (and where ERPs, CRMs, BIs, et al must become integrated and accesible - there would lie the success, btw, and Google Wave is still in the air if they can achieve this level of integrations).

  •  
    6

    annebizcoach

    11/06/09 | Report as spam

    RE: Is Email Dead?

    So what if she was using a teleprompter? The incredible pace of change continues onward. I remember in the early '90s just learning about email. Now it's integral to my and my clients' daily business lives. In another 15 years those 20- and 30-somethings who don't use email much now will be the dominant demographic in business. So I listen to her findings with great interest!
    Anne

    Small Business Coach

  •  
    7

    heymari

    11/06/09 | Report as spam

    Is Email Dead?

    We are in a time where technology changes or something new is mass introduced every 6 months. So I do not dismiss her presentation totally, however email as someone else noted, is the new "paper trail" and I agree important documents will still need to be emailed. I think as a Entrepreneur you have to travel where techonology is going and adapt your self and your business to meet the needs of your potential customer in order to stay in the game!

  •  
    8

    clarashih1

    11/07/09 | Report as spam

    RE: Is Email Dead?

    For the record:
    1. that wasn't a teleprompter. happy It was a view of my slides. I
    usually don't have this and agree I looked at this far too
    often in this segment you watched!

    2. Have no fear, I never declared email to be dead. It is still
    by far the most important communication medium for most
    people I know, myself included. I was sharing my surprise at
    the results of my research surveying young people.

    Actually, communication technology more often evolves
    (expands to include a new communication channel) rather
    than replaces. Phones did not displace in-person meetings.
    Email did not displace phones. Facebook is not displacing
    email. It's expansive. An exception to this rule might be the
    telegraph.

    I encourage you to watch the rest of my presentation on the
    Enterprise 2.0 Conference website. This was just a small
    soundbyte - I look forward to your thoughts.

    Cheers,
    Clara Shih
    @clarashih and yes, you can email me too if you'd prefer happy
    clara@thefacebookera.com

  •  
    9

    NewsView

    11/18/09 | Report as spam

    RE: Is Email Dead?

    Two observations:

    1. Email is somewhat pointless because too many
    people are in the habit of ignoring it    . In my experience,
    email never took on the same urgency to a lot of non-tech
    people that a voicemail or an answering machine message
    did. People understood that you were supposed to make an
    effort to return calls; they never seem to realize the same
    applied to email etiquette. For a lot of years I have been
    both annoyed and hurt by so-called friends and family who
    don't see a need to reply when personally addressed. (To be
    perfectly clear, I'm not referring to daily or even weekly
    deluges either ? just the friendly note every now and then.)
    Worse, a percentage these same friends and family
    routinely FORWARD complete lies that don't check out on
    Snopes and other sites dedicated to "outing" urban legends
    and Internet rumors. Even more bizarre, no matter how
    many times you attempt to put the record straight with
    these types, it never occurs to these folks that it is rude or
    that they ought to be embarrassed for being so gullible
    and/or too lazy to check before sending it to 100 of their
    closest friends. That's another breach of etiquette: Prove
    that you are on email long enough to send around inane
    jokes or controversial political allegations but not long
    enough to respond to those who take time out of their life to
    personally write you. I think part of the problem is that
    people hide behind their email and pass off rude behavior
    with the "dog ate it" mentality (except it's "lost in
    cyberspace"). It's also quite fashionable to be too busy to
    keep up with email. To ignore an email and/or to write a
    misspelled two-liner free of capitalization and punctuation
    means you have an important job. Running around like a
    chicken with one's head cutoff is a badge of honor these
    days. Etiquette is not. Which brings me to my next point:

    2. Back in the 1980s I was a Mac fan before it was popular
    to be a tech user of any kind. I started an ezine ? what
    they now call a blog ? complete with a list of subscribers at
    a time when most American households were not online
    (mid 1990s). In fact, I was the kind of computer user who
    could get into my Mac and repair it without a service center
    or an Apple Store at my disposal. So when people had
    trouble with their computers, I was one of the "early
    adopters" who could help. Fast forward over a decade later
    and while I haven't even hit 40 yet, I'm burned out on all
    things tech and geek. I want to live in the real world,
    not the virtual one.     Hence, while my 30-50-something
    friends are on Facebook and LinkedIn, the only social
    networking I've dabbled in is Twitter.

    I vastly prefer going outdoors to enjoy the sunshine, talking
    to people face-to-face ? I even started up some old
    fashioned card and board game nights to buck the virtual
    gaming trend ? and I save a boatload of money by not
    texting and talking on my cell phone at all hours of the day
    and night. (And BTW, after all these years insisting cell
    phones were safe, now the science confirms that brain
    tumors and other adverse effects of over-indulgence in cell
    phones are an actual risk? go figure.)

    Call me nostalgic. I am no technophobe; for other reasons I
    choose to "think differently". But then, again, I've never
    been one for following. As soon as something becomes
    overly faddish ? "everybody's doing it" ? it begins to turn
    me off. More importantly, there are pragmatic reasons: The
    digital obsession A) wastes time, B) costs money, C) erodes
    all semblance of personal privacy, D) brings rude people out
    of the woodwork as a byproduct of hiding behind their fake
    Internet usernames. Consequently, holding an honest or
    intelligent conversation is near impossible in a discussion
    forum ? so why risk a public wall and a ruined reputation
    or a lost job opportunity due to complete strangers or trolls?
    Nope. Social networking doesn't add up for me. My friends
    continue to send me Facebook and LinkedIn invites and I
    ignore them.

    Bottom Line

    All of the above were reason enough for me to step back
    and re-evaluate this medium's overbearing role in my life.
    My conclusion? Unless the Internet is the best or only means
    to stay in touch with loved ones who are far away, the
    appeal of email, texting and social networking is limited.

    The next book on the cultural evolution of tech needs to be
    written on Information Age Overload (burnout). The tech
    honeymoon is over for me, and I know other Gen-Xers who
    feel the same as I do after initially embracing it. After all,
    many of us use email and Internet because our jobs require
    it. So going home and typing messages on a cell phone or
    personal computer "just for kicks" doesn't cut it after a long
    day tied to those same productivity tools at work.

    I foresee a backlash on the horizon.

    In time, the novelty of socializing through a cell phone or on
    a computer will wear off and soured sentiments will
    represent the feelings of a much larger percentage of the
    population. Because burnout happens.

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Is Email Dead?

At the Enterprise 2.0 conference in San Francisco, Clara Shih, CEO of Hearsay Labs and author of "The Facebook Era," explains how social web platforms, such as Twitter and Facebook, are impacting businesses. She says email is slowly being replaced by social networking applications -- a shift driven by young people.

>> Welcome to what I call the Facebook and iPhone and Twitter era. Just a few quick stats for you: Over 300 million people on Facebook, up 153% from last year. But not only are they signing up they are logging in. In fact people are spending over 8 billion minutes a day on Facebook. That's an incredible amount of time and whatever business we're in whatever role or function we may play we need to be where our audience is. We need to communicate through the channels preferred by those audiences whether it's internal audiences with our employees or external audiences with our training and services partners or our customers. Twitter and iPhone show similar spectacular growth. 58 million users on Twitter today and nearly the same amount on the iPhone and so the question is is email dead? I spoke with a lot of younger people in college and high school in researching while I was writing the Facebook Era and I was astonished to learn that many university students say just don't use email. They'll use email occasionally to communicate with their parents, or professor, prospective employer, other so called adults but with each other they're using Facebook, Facebook wall posts, Facebook messages and they're using SMS and that has real profound implications for how we as organization leaders communicate whether it's to recruit someone or market or sell to someone so on and so forth. But it's not just a snapshot in time this growth has been going on for the last 5 years. It's really incredible to watch. You can see these picture you know story book hockey stick graphs for both Facebook since it started on the left as well as the iPhone and iTouch subscribers on the right. So it's incredible momentum being led in a social space by companies like Facebook and being led in the mobile space by companies like Apple with the iPhone. But although in 2007, in May 2007 when I was in Hong Gong Facebook was largely a college student site that's no longer the case. I mean certainly you can see on the graph on the right that young people between the ages of 18 and 25 still comprise the largest group 29% but you'll see that the group 26 and 34 isn't far behind and the fastest growing group is actually people between the ages of 35 and 49 and surprisingly the second fastest growing group are women over the age of 55. This is really significant because all of us in technology know that this group of older women traditionally was extremely hard to reach. The older women 55 and older they were technophobes, in general people like your mothers and grandmothers they generally did not sign up for technology services as soon as they came up but they are signing up in mass for the iPhone and they are signing up in mass for Facebook and so it really goes back to what the previous panel talked about which is that social media enables us to be people centric rather than technology centric and it makes these technologies approachable and feel like they're part of everyday normal human interaction. And so as a result CXOs are responding, CMOs are responding, CIOs are responding, CEOs are taking the lead and in a time when we are being cautious about the economic recovery and slow to expand our budgets again we still see budgets staying the same or shrinking in some cases but the 1 area that is growing for people is social media and that's where people are a lot of executives are investing their time and money.

==== Transcribed by Automatic Sync Technologies ====