Facebook Thinks Email is “Probably Going Away” (Really!?!)
Sheryl Sandberg, COO of Facebook recently made a prediction at the Nielson 360 Conference that email will be toppled by social media because of the millions of wall posts on Facebook. However, many people disagree with this biased logic. Since when has the launch of a new channel actually killed an existing channel?
Remember when email was the new channel and beating postal mail? Everyone predicted the death of tradition mail delivery as if it were the pony express (another example of the evolution of a channel, not its demise). Sure, traditional mail has taken a beating from email, but postal mail is not dead and it shows that with each new channel that is born, our ways of communicating are enhanced.
In my previous post, “What’s All the Buzz About the Inbox,” I commented how Facebook and Google Buzz are infiltrating the email inbox to ‘stay top of mind’ for consumers who are too busy to spend hours and hours on social media. That move demonstrated that email isn’t going away, and that there is actually a healthy symbiosis among these two channels. Email and social media are actually interdependent on one another (something we heard a lot about at the Online Marketing Summit last week – for more on that, check out Brian Bierbaum’s latest post).
The growth of one channel might actually strengthen the role of each existing channel. For example, wall posts are great for threaded chat conversations but they aren’t ideal for delivery of important news or secure documents. Email is a clunky tool for threaded chats, but it’s dominant in the marketplace for things like online banking notices and health information. Would you personally want your bank posting on your wall that your checking account is overdrawn, or how about having your friends know that you’re subscribing to your HMO’s infertility newsletter? Maybe, but not likely.
It’s not a matter of email vs. social media – consumers need both channels for different reasons.
@jlarranaga
