Has business communication evolved to a more social activity? Is email headed down the same path as the hand-written letter? Is email dying? I say NO.
Recently, a Computerworld editorial piece suggested it might be time to wave goodbye to email as the core business and personal communication. To that writer, email’s central role in our daily lives has been pushed aside by the rapid growth of social networking services like Facebook and Twitter and by the increased use of collaboration tools like Microsoft SharePoint.
You can stop mourning because email isn’t going anywhere. Email will remain a primary communication tool in offices across the world, despite the increased integration between it and social media platforms.
With more people joining social networks (Facebook just hit the 600 million mark), online communities are used for personal communications and relationships more and more. The ease of posting a comment on a wall or discussion group keeps people in touch with their friends and networks and adds to the pleasure of their lives. Does this toll the death knell for email? Definitely not. In fact, the entry of social media as a personal communication medium may take some of the pressure off of business email, allowing it to be used in the way it works best – to communicate information and transact business swiftly, efficiently, and inexpensively.
Email is not going away.
Business relies on it, and business sure isn’t going away. The velocity of business transactions continues to soar. The speed of communication has advanced from days to hours to minutes to seconds. The ability to transmit documents across the world in seconds underscores email’s value to the business world.
Even though many communicate via social networks, the foundational medium for business communication will remain email. With workers spending the majority of their days conducting business, email as their primary communication tool will continue to grow. Social networks, while they no doubt have a place in business, will never be their main communication channel. Most of them rely on followers, friends, or links to enable interactions, requiring extra steps to enable communication. Additionally, email has stood the test of time, whereas some social networks have only a fleeting presence.
Yet with the ever-changing technological landscape, the use of email is bound to morph into ways we may not be able to predict. The presence of social networks will most likely impact this evolution. For instance, most social networking platforms allow members to receive messages from their site delivered to their email inboxes. When users opt for this, the volume of email entering their inboxes will (obviously) increase. The flow of these messages into email accounts will certainly make email more social, but workers will have to develop new habits to manage all of them.
The inevitable frustration following an overload of social networks into email systems will also be a challenge for many. Work/life balance and priority-setting issues are bound to grow as workers fall behind in handling all the messages delivered to their inboxes. Managers will have to stay on top of the trends in order to ensure that their workers stay on top of their work.
Due to the advent of social networking, separating business and social communication might actually be easier than before. It may evolve so that email will be used more and more for purely business reasons, while online social interactions will be reserved for Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and whatever future iterations of these may come.
We do know is that the way people use email is bound to change. The sheer volume of email that the average worker receives will dictate different ways to manage and respond. We also know that businesses rely on email. Business is not going away and neither is email. The future use of email remains to be seen, but we can at least see where it’s going. Email is not dying, so instead of wishing it an “R.I.P.,” remember that email is still a WIP, a work in progress that’s evolving alongside our other communication tools.
What do YOU think?
