Email - It's not what it used to be, nor will it ever be again

I was just looking through my Yahoo!, Gmail and Hotmail personal email accounts and I've discovered something, my friends don't send me many emails anymore. I communicate with them through Facebook, Twitter and MySpace (for my musician friends). The only emails I receive are from companies trying to sell me stuff. I'm still habituated to looking through my personal emails in the morning but I know my sons, all in their 20's only check email once per week or less and it's only because they can read it on their phones that they check it at all. My high school aged daughter has completely abandoned email and communicates primarily using Facebook and more specifically the IM client buried in Facebook. Text based messaging has really replaced long phone calls for most inter-personal communication. Actually, it's pretty remarkable that we've spent a fortune buying expensive phones to primarily send text messages.

For business communications, I and my customers and prospects still rely heavily on email for communications. You can flesh out ideas more completely and attach documents to emails, something not easily supported or secure using Facebook, Twitter and the like. Although you can read a lot of articles on "The Revolution of Social Networking for Marketing," I believe there is something more profound going on under the covers. People are changing the way they socially interact using one to many communication methods for personal relationships sharing, events, ideas and social calendars.

In business, prospects and potential buyers still want to hide in anonymity, but I see customers (people who have purchased your products) wanting to open up their business processes to tools like Facebook, Twitter, blogs and the like to accelerate business and reduce friction. I also see a day where there will be one-to-many tools where prospects will want to interact with potential vendors on a one-to-many basis. I know that one of my colleagues has just been scheduled into a weekly conference call with a large systems integrator working on winning a massive federal procurement. The call includes their employees and vendors to update the team and provide a strategic view into the status of this opportunity. Imagine an application running 7 X 24 where everyone could share and update, provide levels of security (not everyone can see everything) and become a project repository and have it be as easy to use as Facebook. I know I’ll hear… SharePoint, but it is too rigid and not friendly. Here’s an opportunity for new kind of communications tool aimed at business users.