Reports of email's death slightly exaggerated

Is email losing its importance as a communications tool? Michael B. Farrell writing at Boston.com would seem to want you to think so. In the March 29 article “E-mail gets a cold shoulder,” he notes that “the amount of consumer e-mail traffic fell 9.5% between 2010 and 2012, and is projected to keep declining for the near future, according to the Radicati Group, a Palo Alto, CA, technology research firm.”

That may well be the case with respect to consumers, but the article mostly focuses on businesses, with anecdotes that don't support the premise.

The article begins by citing Dmitri Gunn of MIT’s Media Lab, “one of the most hyperconnected places on Earth.” Dunn, Farrell writes, is turning off his email, at least to the outside world. “If it’s urgent, or important, then by God, they’ll call,” Farrell quotes Gunn as saying.

Farrell goes on to quote Rudina Seseri, a partner at the Cambridge venture capital firm Fairhaven Capital, as saying, “Here’s the thing: You hand people cards and they send you e-mail. “If someone actually cares what I think, they can make an effort and follow me on Twitter.” And Politico reported March 23 that Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano told a group of reporters, “I think email just sucks up time.”

Neither Gunn nor Seseri list an email address on their business card, yet Seseri's de-emphasis on email seems relatively modest. Farrell writes Seseri receives more than 100 emails per day but now spends less time deleting unwanted ones. According to Politico, Napolitano relies on the phone and on briefings by staff members, who presumably do use email.

I am in disagreement with Dunn on the matter. An unwanted phone call is much more intrusive than an unwanted email.

Farrell points out that social networks and professional networking tools such as those from Salesforce.com are offering much more than the basic communication capabilities of email. He quotes Anna Rosenman, senior product marketing manager at Salesforce, as saying, “E-mail is broken. E-mail is one-to-one communication, and that’s not how we need to be communicating.”

Well, OK, there is something to be said for many-to-many communication, but one-to-one communication remains critical in many instances. And social networking platforms may have some work to do before becoming truly effective collaborative tools. Marissa Mayer effectively admitted as much when she ordered Yahoo's work-at-home employees to begin reporting to the office.

Social networking platforms are an increasingly important part of business, and I hope you'll follow EE-Evaluation Engineering and me on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and so forth. And Constant Contact, a marketing firm, recently surveyed small businesses and found that 80% see value in social media platforms, with LinkedIn and Twitter growing rapidly in acceptance, although Facebook is dominant with 82% of respondents citing it as most effective.

Nevertheless, email will remain an effective tool that will continue to grow in importance. Here in fact is what Sara Radicati of the Radicati Group has to say in her blog about the firm's “Emial Statistics Report, 2012-2016”: “Consumer email accounts, which are freely available from large portals and ISPs, make up the majority of worldwide email accounts. In 2012, consumer email accounts represent 75% of worldwide mailboxes, while corporate (i.e. business) email accounts represent 25% of worldwide mailboxes. Over the next four years, we expect corporate email accounts to increase at a faster pace than consumer email accounts, as organizations continue to extend email services to employees who may not have had access to email in the past.” In particular, she notes, the mobile email market is expanding as both consumers and business users access email over Android and iOS devices.

Commenting on Farrell's article in Boston.com, trueendurance points out, “If anything, this article points to the 'importance' of email, not to its demise… Instead of the place where your life gets 'twittered' away, it is the place where important business transpires…

“Email is not dead… It is merely going through a phase where it has been tested … and now, it stands above the rest of the noise… It is the place where you have your most worthy conversations … where you have your most trusted discussions with the people who you care about the most.”