Yesterday I read the article ‘Are we facing the death of email?’ by Adam Sherwin at The Independent. Just by looking at the headline, I already knew the answer. No.
I use email to stay in contact with many of my close friends and family, let alone to communicate with clients, colleagues and potential new business.
Email is still the best way to contact me, as alerts come straight through to my BlackBerry.
That’s not to say that I don’t pick up Facebook messages, direct messages on Twitter and comments on my blog. As well as old school phone calls and text messages (when I’m not too busy replying to emails!).
I completely agree that email can waste a lot of time at work, if it is used innapproriately. You know you when you take a day off work and return to a stupid amount of new messages in your inbox to start filing through.
The Independent article discusses the CEO of the information technology services company Atos, Thierry Breton, and his decision to ban his staff from sending each other emails. He has been complaining that the emails waste time and are outmoded.
Only 10 per cent of the 200 electronic messages his employees receive per day turn out to be useful, Breton claims.
Perhaps a different way to solve this issue would be to encourage alternative ways to communicate with eachother at work. A weekly staff meeting to share big announcements and important news is an obvious solution which in some offices still doesn’t happen. A company Facebook Page is a good place to share interesting articles and studies, instead of emailing links around.
Courtesy of Sebastiaan ter Burg/Flickr
I recently watched an insightful documentary by Dragon’s Den Peter Jones, called How We Made Our Millions. In the programme Peter met Richard Reed, one of the founders of Innocent the smoothie company. Richard had a similar view about emails to Thierry Breton, although he knew that in some situations they couldn’t be avoided. As a solution, he encouraged members of staff to approach him directly at his desk in the middle of the office floor. He even had a spare bamboo hanging seat for anyone to make themselves comfortable while they spoke to him. Peter teased his ‘hippy’ approach, but it seemed to be effective.
Thinking about all of my contacts that I keep in touch with by email, switching to social media just wouldn’t work. For a start it is difficult to have a conversation with an 140 character limit on Twitter, and Facebook messages are often not picked up for a couple of days. My parents are tech savvy, but I know that email is the quickest way to reach them as they check it most often. You might think this is just because of an age difference but many of my 25 year old friends communicate most through their email.
Services that I have blogged about before like Groupon are heavily reliant on email marketing, and big UK brands still get effective results from their email campaigns.
I think, as Adam Sherwin concludes in his article, ‘If email is dying, it will be a lingering demise.’
