Is Email Dying of Old Age? Part 2 - The Social Media Takeover
1.
What is so different about social media? In part 1 of this article we analyzed email.
We detected its flaws and inefficiencies.
We also concluded that it is still the "only game in town".
In other words, although social media represents the new way of communicating, it is not ready yet! So, what is so different about social media that makes it the natural successor of email? No, it's not MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn or any other tool currently out there trying to take (and keep) a place under the sun.
It's the concept! What is really new about social media can be described with a single phrase: The power of deciding who you want to communicate with before any communication takes place! That's it.
That's the revolution.
Oh, wait...
that's the big deal?! Yes, that's huge! Think about it.
With the concept of selecting communication partners comes the concept of community.
When you chose the people that you want to communicate with (and they accept!), you can group them into communities: "Friends", "Business", "Tennis players", etc.
You can now send private messages (emails?!) to any person in any community or post messages/information to a whole community.
Bear in mind that you can make one person a member of as many communities as you want.
A tennis player can also be your friend as well as a coworker in your business.
Marketers will now have to create communities of people that may be interested in their products and, one way or another, entice them to join in so they can communicate their product promotion messages (subject for another article!).
And spam is over! People trying to promote brides from some exotic country will now have to build a community of people that are actually interested in that kind of romance.
Risk of viruses and malware spread is greatly reduced.
Remember, you can always trace the source of your messages since you had to formally accept the sender prior to any communication.
Of course, if you accept just about anybody into your communities...
Spoof is basically impossible.
I just got recently a message from "Facebook" telling me that they had to "reset my password" and "I had 24 hours to login and reinstate all my private information".
It was a spoof message that looked like it was sent by Facebook.
This is not possible in the social media world where, if I want to receive messages from Facebook, I will have to join the Facebook community.
Any other Facebook look-alike community cannot send me messages because I didn't join them! Information overload is easier to manage.
Of course that under this new way of communicating you will still be flooded with information.
But now, private messages are separate from the "broadcast" ones and they will all be neatly organized by communities.
You may build a community for your company, send private messages to any of your coworkers while, as a manager, you can post a memo for the whole company.
2.
So what is the problem with Social Media? Most (if not all!) the articles that I read about social media (and I try to read as many as I can) make the same mistake: They criticize the tools! "Social media is bad because Facebook this or MySpace that...
" In general, the toughest social media critics focus on two major areas: Lack of privacy Within a community, anybody can post anything for the whole community to read.
There are horror stories about people that have been fired or relationships that ended after incriminating photos were posted on social media.
There are two ways that this can happen: (1) Somebody posts a compromising photo of another community member with malicious intents.
Well, don't blame social media.
This could also have been done via an email with the photo attached or by posting it on a popular web site.
(2) A photo was posted with your name as a "tag" (search word).
The social media tool (e.
g.
Facebook) picks up the tag and publishes it on all communities that you belong to.
But this can only happen if you allow it.
If you set Facebook (e.
g.
) to show tagged photos only to yourself, that's what is going to happen.
Another privacy issue is the fact that Google is more and more picking up social media postings and showing them on the search engine.
The correct tools will also allow you to stay away from Google...
Most of the people that I communicate with are not on social media Right! That is the problem.
More, they may be on social media but not on the tools that I subscribe.
I am personally on Facebook and Twitter and I have to admit that 80% of the people that I communicate with may be on Linkedin, MySpace or nowhere else but certainly not on "my sites".
So what do I do? Email, of course! But that is how we started this conversation wasn't it? Email is still the "only game in town" because email is still the only universal communications tool available.
That leads us to the real problem with social media: The concept is right but the tools are not ready yet 3.
The future of social media Every emerging technology has confusing debuts.
In 1878, a well known communications company internal memo stated that "This `telephone' has too many shortcomings to be seriously considered as a practical form of communication.
The device is inherently of no value to us.
" Throughout history, the same happened with cars, computers, televisions and it will keep on happening with anything new and truly revolutionary that comes out; when it comes out.
Social media is no different.
Today, social media is at its birth.
It exists in a highly fragmented environment (MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, Meetup, Tagged and many, many others) where multiple players change their dominance impact almost every month while new players test the waters to see if there is any niche that can still be successfully explored.
In the current environment, you may have to resort to different tools to achieve different objectives and, in the process, repeat yourself endlessly since the integration between the existing tools is primitive at best.
While this is happening, the "web owners" (large organizations such as Microsoft, Google, Yahoo...
) are watching, learning and getting ready to play.
In its beta versions, Microsoft Vine and Google Wave have been advertised by its publishers as the next thing to watch in the social media world.
The reality is that the market requires a more integrated and robust environment dominated by companies that have the clout and the power to establish industry standards.
Before that happens, we will be watching a series of short lived experiments.
But the concept of social media as a community based communications engine is here to stay and I believe it will end up integrating the "postal" type solution that email represents.
And email, as we know it, will be dead.
4.
Should we wait? On a personal side, it's a personal decision.
In a business point of view there is never any value in being the last one to arrive anywhere and there is already a lot that can be accomplished with what is available.
According to a Deloitte study, 30% of American companies use social media as part of business and operational strategy.
The bottom line is simple: People are out there talking to each other and, if you are not part of it, they are not listening to you! Start now! Using 15 minutes per day of your time you can build a Twitter community, exchange industry information and establish contacts that, in time, will prove invaluable to your business.
Because if you always wait for the next best thing, you will wait forever.
What is so different about social media? In part 1 of this article we analyzed email.
We detected its flaws and inefficiencies.
We also concluded that it is still the "only game in town".
In other words, although social media represents the new way of communicating, it is not ready yet! So, what is so different about social media that makes it the natural successor of email? No, it's not MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn or any other tool currently out there trying to take (and keep) a place under the sun.
It's the concept! What is really new about social media can be described with a single phrase: The power of deciding who you want to communicate with before any communication takes place! That's it.
That's the revolution.
Oh, wait...
that's the big deal?! Yes, that's huge! Think about it.
With the concept of selecting communication partners comes the concept of community.
When you chose the people that you want to communicate with (and they accept!), you can group them into communities: "Friends", "Business", "Tennis players", etc.
You can now send private messages (emails?!) to any person in any community or post messages/information to a whole community.
Bear in mind that you can make one person a member of as many communities as you want.
A tennis player can also be your friend as well as a coworker in your business.
Marketers will now have to create communities of people that may be interested in their products and, one way or another, entice them to join in so they can communicate their product promotion messages (subject for another article!).
And spam is over! People trying to promote brides from some exotic country will now have to build a community of people that are actually interested in that kind of romance.
Risk of viruses and malware spread is greatly reduced.
Remember, you can always trace the source of your messages since you had to formally accept the sender prior to any communication.
Of course, if you accept just about anybody into your communities...
Spoof is basically impossible.
I just got recently a message from "Facebook" telling me that they had to "reset my password" and "I had 24 hours to login and reinstate all my private information".
It was a spoof message that looked like it was sent by Facebook.
This is not possible in the social media world where, if I want to receive messages from Facebook, I will have to join the Facebook community.
Any other Facebook look-alike community cannot send me messages because I didn't join them! Information overload is easier to manage.
Of course that under this new way of communicating you will still be flooded with information.
But now, private messages are separate from the "broadcast" ones and they will all be neatly organized by communities.
You may build a community for your company, send private messages to any of your coworkers while, as a manager, you can post a memo for the whole company.
2.
So what is the problem with Social Media? Most (if not all!) the articles that I read about social media (and I try to read as many as I can) make the same mistake: They criticize the tools! "Social media is bad because Facebook this or MySpace that...
" In general, the toughest social media critics focus on two major areas: Lack of privacy Within a community, anybody can post anything for the whole community to read.
There are horror stories about people that have been fired or relationships that ended after incriminating photos were posted on social media.
There are two ways that this can happen: (1) Somebody posts a compromising photo of another community member with malicious intents.
Well, don't blame social media.
This could also have been done via an email with the photo attached or by posting it on a popular web site.
(2) A photo was posted with your name as a "tag" (search word).
The social media tool (e.
g.
Facebook) picks up the tag and publishes it on all communities that you belong to.
But this can only happen if you allow it.
If you set Facebook (e.
g.
) to show tagged photos only to yourself, that's what is going to happen.
Another privacy issue is the fact that Google is more and more picking up social media postings and showing them on the search engine.
The correct tools will also allow you to stay away from Google...
Most of the people that I communicate with are not on social media Right! That is the problem.
More, they may be on social media but not on the tools that I subscribe.
I am personally on Facebook and Twitter and I have to admit that 80% of the people that I communicate with may be on Linkedin, MySpace or nowhere else but certainly not on "my sites".
So what do I do? Email, of course! But that is how we started this conversation wasn't it? Email is still the "only game in town" because email is still the only universal communications tool available.
That leads us to the real problem with social media: The concept is right but the tools are not ready yet 3.
The future of social media Every emerging technology has confusing debuts.
In 1878, a well known communications company internal memo stated that "This `telephone' has too many shortcomings to be seriously considered as a practical form of communication.
The device is inherently of no value to us.
" Throughout history, the same happened with cars, computers, televisions and it will keep on happening with anything new and truly revolutionary that comes out; when it comes out.
Social media is no different.
Today, social media is at its birth.
It exists in a highly fragmented environment (MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, Meetup, Tagged and many, many others) where multiple players change their dominance impact almost every month while new players test the waters to see if there is any niche that can still be successfully explored.
In the current environment, you may have to resort to different tools to achieve different objectives and, in the process, repeat yourself endlessly since the integration between the existing tools is primitive at best.
While this is happening, the "web owners" (large organizations such as Microsoft, Google, Yahoo...
) are watching, learning and getting ready to play.
In its beta versions, Microsoft Vine and Google Wave have been advertised by its publishers as the next thing to watch in the social media world.
The reality is that the market requires a more integrated and robust environment dominated by companies that have the clout and the power to establish industry standards.
Before that happens, we will be watching a series of short lived experiments.
But the concept of social media as a community based communications engine is here to stay and I believe it will end up integrating the "postal" type solution that email represents.
And email, as we know it, will be dead.
4.
Should we wait? On a personal side, it's a personal decision.
In a business point of view there is never any value in being the last one to arrive anywhere and there is already a lot that can be accomplished with what is available.
According to a Deloitte study, 30% of American companies use social media as part of business and operational strategy.
The bottom line is simple: People are out there talking to each other and, if you are not part of it, they are not listening to you! Start now! Using 15 minutes per day of your time you can build a Twitter community, exchange industry information and establish contacts that, in time, will prove invaluable to your business.
Because if you always wait for the next best thing, you will wait forever.
Source...