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Will email REALLY be replaced by texting and communication through social media sites?
Recently, I've heard a lot of talk suggesting that email may become an antiquated means of communication in the very near future. With the ever-increasing prevalence of mobile texting and social media messaging, can we expect email accounts to become a thing of the past? If so, how soon?
Best Answer
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- Andy Thorpe,
- Mike R,
- SivaKumar AVKD
I seem to see either an article, a blog post or a question somewhere on the internet like this almost daily these past few months...so it seems to be on a lot of peoples minds. The short answer is NO..email is going to be around for a very long time.
However, I do think that email is going to evolve just like mobile and social is evolving. Email is digital glue to most of these experience and will likely be changing as these things change. Still don't believe it? Here are some of my crazy rants and realities to the "email is dead theory"
1. Email has been around way longer than any of these mediums. Did Fedex kill mail delivery? No...it has evolved.
2. You need email to be in the "legitimate business world". Try to run a business or be in a corporation and communicate via texting or social media only....yea..it won't happen.
3. Try and register on FB or Twitter without an email address? Try resetting your password.
4. When you purchase something from Amazon or another online site...ask to have your order confirmation sent to your FB page or via text. Sounds secure?
I can go on and on an on...but I think you get the idea. Is email dead or dying. Nope. Does it need to evolve and change with the current social climate we are in...absolutely. It's going to be a great 3-4 years to see how things are going to shake out, but I am confident that email will be around for many many years.
Andrew Kordek
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- Mike R,
- Anna Smith
Yes and no. Most people are missing the significance of the e-mail offering inside social networking. You don't need to know your friend's e-mail address - you just type their name and send them a mail. A system so simple that even the most technophobic can easily come to grips with it.
But from a business perspective it's unlikely that social mail would ever replace e-mail, it's common practice to swap mail addresses, add important addresses to your directory and then go from there.
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- Mike R
Hi Mike
This is an ongoing debate and it seems super unlikely, to me. Texting is great, but too short for a substantive conversation. Social networks don't guarantee privacy for your messages (just observe all of Facebook's regular changes and disregard for user privacy). Email may shift, may converge with these tools, but it isn't going away any time soon.
Just had a roundtable here with Tyler Garns from Infusionsoft (marketing automation and email marketing expert), Travis Campbell of MarketingProfessor, and Shelly Kramer from V3IM. All three are noted experts and all three emphatically stated that email the same -- email is not going away. It is one of the more intimate ways to have a conversation outside of F2F and phone.
http://www.focus.com/events/email-chat/focus-marketing-roundtable-email-versu...
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- Mike R
It's an interesting point.
Studies have shown that socially, people are inconvenienced by having to write a subject line but often equally inconvenienced about having to count characters. This is kind of what Facebook messaging and the social inbox was supposed to attend to but it still often requires an internet connection because Facebook is the hub.
In my opinion for anything to change to evolve and meet the requirements of user's convenience, affordable mobile internet will have to be a great deal faster.
The fact that Facebook has already got such a wide user base and has put in a central point for messaging now means that it will be well placed when something much much faster than 3g takes over.
Once that's in place more software will come about but as usual it will take time for the world to decide which ones will stick and if they can complete with Facebook socially. It is also unlikely that anything will compete with email for B2C & B2C marketing due to email's place in business.
In the mean time nothing can touch email as a communication tool. For it's flexible length of content, multi-media options and the fact that the inbox - however crowded it can get - is still the best place to store all kinds of communications and reply with whichever priority the recipient in inclined to allocate.And hopefully HTML5 with videos in the future.
More needs to be done to make the experience better; ie: tools like otherinbox to automatically organise your existing inbox is a good idea and we need more like it.
Smart Phone email client apps should have more complex abilities in their interface to move the processing into the hardware rather than the boring waiting from more optimised web clients.
Microsoft needs to fix Outlook, there is a lot of room for someone to beat Outlook if they have the money to develop something that can do all that Outlook can and be better but it's unlikely anyone will take the risk. So at a Business level we will be restricted for a long yet.
To conclude email is here to stay and it will evolve in it's capabilities & interfaces as technology and mobile web speeds improve and we can continue to hope that MS Outlook stops being the week link.
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- Mike R
“E-mail vs. social media” has now become the hottest topic ever to discuss. A number of people amplify on social media for its effectiveness in comparison to email marketing. On the other hand, some people have defended email marketing and acknowledged its victory over social media. Some call social media to be the most modern communication tool and some are in favour of email marketing for its reliability in reaching business organizations and professionals. The point is, both have their own significance depending upon communication intent and targeted audience.
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- SivaKumar AVKD
Emails is a professional communication tool
Social media websites is a social communication tool.
You cant replace this by that,but your business communication strategy may get more power by one of the tools
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- Mike R
The answers here obviously say no for several reasons.
1. most are, if not all are greater than 140 characters (Twitter is out).
2. they would be, in a business sense, confidential (Facebook and LinkedIn out).
3. some of the answers are more verbose - over 1000 characters (Facebook and LinkedIn out).
So you are left with e-mail.
I don't think email is going to "die" anytime soon. In personal communications, email definitely isn't the no.1 tool for me. However, I rely on it a lot in my work. There are alternatives to email for communicating inside the team. Sometimes even a text message might be appropriate. Say, when I need an answer to some short yes/no question in the weekend :) But as for contacts outside the organization - email matters a lot. It looks like millions of people might feel the same way, because stats show that email is still a very important business communication tool. If you'd like to see some facts and figures supporting this point, you can check out our infographic: http://www.wrike.com/blog_images/184294/infographic_email_Wrike.jpg.
On a related note... A recent statement made by Thierry Breton, CEO of Atos, about the "elimination" of email at the company churned up quite a bit of controversy in cyberspace. Many of the pieces sharing the news included misinformation, and much of the commentary reflected misunderstanding. I wrote a post that clarifies what Atos is actually doing, offers insights on why it’s the right move, reflects on some of the reasons for resistance, and highlights the importance of strong leadership in enabling organizations to move ahead in the Digital Era.
http://www.sminorgs.net/2011/12/the-end-of-email-reflections-from-a-digital-e...
Just this week I noticed that Facebook is offering email. I would like to think that email will remain popular for some time.
-JL
as I often say, no one "owns" email... it's a universal protocol.
however, someone "owns" facebook and twitter and others, so they can do whatever they'd like -- such as change privacy policies, add services, remove services and so on.
also, people prefer business use email to communicate directly to them, and this doesn't work on text and personal messages through a social network is not scalable.
email will be around for a very long time...
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If we look at this question from the characteristics of the technology in question - email vs texting vs social media sites - then each is driven by a different type of communication need or behaviour at a specific time.
Email: private or group, but essentially a closed form of communication ; no limits on character length (character and size limits aside) ; more considered type of correspondence ; takes place from your computer or your mobile phone. Perhaps there is an element that it is a bit more of a formal type of communication
Texting: private or group, but essentially a closed form of communication; limit on character length, although you can send multiple texts ; more impulsive type of communication that can take place from wherever you are if you have a mobile phone ; takes place from your mobile phone.
Social media sites: very broad, so in its broadest sense, broadcast out to your followers and beyond (protected Tweets & DMs aside, in the case of Twitter) ; essentially an open/public form of communication ; many have character limits ; more impulsive type of communication that takes place wherever you are if you have a mobile phone ; takes place from your mobile phone or your computer.
If we look at the three 'channels' then the major differences are public vs private, character limits vs no character limit. There is also the difference between how companies use the above channels and how they are used by people.
In the end, we use the channels in different ways depending on our need at a specific time. Whilst our usual assumption is that as new channels come on board they must replace an existing one, the reality is that channels very rarely become obsolete, they simply sit alongside each other. The only one I can think of that is perhaps not as commonly used now as it was 10-20 years ago is the fax.
So, will email be replaced by other forms of communication? In my opinion - unlikely.