Sheryl Sandberg, COO of Facebook.com, pronounced earlier this year at Nielsen’s Consumer 360 conference that in large part thanks to social media, email will soon have gone the way of the Dodo bird.
Her argument stems from the fact that in order to see what the trends of tomorrow are, we only need to look at what today’s teenagers are doing and the statistics she quoted say that only 11% of teenagers use email. She goes on to say that instead of email they use SMS and social networking tools.
Now, I can certainly see her logic about watching what the youth of today are doing, but I don’t know that I completely buy into the idea that email will be going away anytime soon.
First off, today’s teenagers aren’t in an environment that requires professional communication and exchanging of electronic data. It will certainly be interesting to see what happens once these ‘trend setters’ hit the workplace, but I imagine their communication habits will change accordingly.
Of course there’s always the possibility that something will come along, replace the functionality email provides and completely throw things onto their head, but from where I sit today I just don’t see that happening.
For most working adults, email is the lifeline of professional communications. Sure the Facebook message system is pretty cool, but would I really use it to send last months webstats or the presentation for an upcoming meeting? And even if I did, isn’t that sort of an email thing anyways?
At any rate, while I can see Ms. Sandberg’s reasoning ( and reasons for doing it…she is the COO of the largest social networking site after all!), I’m afraid I just don’t buy into it just yet.
What do you think? How do you see the relationship between social media and email evolving?
Go ahead and leave your comments below.
Also, check out what the folks over at Aweber had to say about this evolving relationship. It’s certainly an interesting and well-founded take from the folks that helped write the book an effective email marketing.
Not only does it make for a great song title, but it’s also a powerful business building truth that can serve you well in troubled times. You see, most businesses mistakingly think that if they simply market their business via one method, they’ll be just fine. WRONG!
When you’re using just one method to market your business, whatever that method might be, you’re setting yourself up for disaster. Whether it’s online, or the yellow pages, or tele-marketing, or networking, or even encouraging your customers to provide referrals, by employing just one method of generating new business you put your business at risk if anything were to happen to that one stream.
Picture a bath tub for just a moment. While you may have a powerful stream of water filling up the tub, you also have the drain that’s letting some of that water escape. Now, for the time being the stream might be filling the tub faster than the drain allows the water to escape. But what happens if the stream get’s turned off for any reason at all? Sure, your tub will have water for a little while, but eventually it’s going to be empty.
Now, what do you think would happen if instead of just one stream filling your tub with water, you had multiple streams of water filling your tub? So instead of just relying on the yellow pages for new business, you also had systems in the local newspaper, or on the Internet, or relationships with other businesses, or your networking activities, or any other method of marketing your business you can think of?
This time when the main stream gets shut off, your tub won’t end up empty because you have all these other sources of customers keeping it filled.
It’s the same idea with your business. When you rely on just one source of generating new customers, you put your business at risk. So, look to employ AS MANY marketing methods as you profitably can so that when the day does come that you lose one of your streams, you’ll still be able to grow you business at a healthy rate.
