I have just read yet another prediction of the death of email. Mostly I just ignore them, but today’s eMarketer Daily with the subject line: 'Social Nets and Blogs More Popular Than E-Mails' is so shocking in its (mis)use of research and gratuitous brownnosing of social networking; that I felt forced to respond immediately.
The article begins as follows: “In the US and several other countries, more people use social networks and blogs than use e-mail. Does that mean the days of e-mail as an effective marketing tool are numbered?”
WHAT? More people use social networks and blogs than use e-mail!!!
My BS meter sprang into life immediately – for starters it is impossible to sign up for any blog or social network without an email address. Then you have to factor in the fact that all social networks and blogs etc. use email to reach the people (most people in the world) who DON’T spend every minute of every day reading blogs or their Facebook page.
So how can there be more users of Social media than email?
I decided to take a closer look. The article is based on a piece of research by Nielson entitled Global Faces and Networked Places and shows this chart as evidence of this staggering claim.
The research:
- does NOT claim that more people USE Member communities than email
- does not define active reach
- does not define email
- does not equate active reach with unique users
- shows that email use is growing faster than search
Even if “active reach” was a measure of the number of unique users does anyone truly believe software manufacturers sites are more popular than all social networking sites and blogs put together?
Apart from that, what I find most irritating is how lazy commentators become when they see something that panders to their emotional beliefs especially when it come to the flavour of the month!
To quote Warren Buffet “it's wonderful to promote new industries because they are very promotable. It’s hard to promote investment in a mundane product. It's much easier to promote an esoteric product, even particularly one [that doesn’t make money], because there is no quantitative guideline.”
Dela Quist
CEO Alchemy Worx
The Email Marketing Agency
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said on March 17th, 2009 at 9:36 pm
I couldn’t agree more, Dela. I’m just at South by South West Interactive in Austin, Texas where all the ‘bright young things’ have seemingly long since come to the conclusion that email is dead – without thinking that how fundamentally embedded it is into the social networking scene. And even if under 25s aren’t using it much, what medium do they expect to receive their flight confirmations or requests about changing delivery times – let alone their password reset notifications. Sure email is going to change – it would be fossilised if it didn’t – but I can’t see it dying just yet. (Fingers crossed big time, seeing as it’s how I (and you) make my living!)
said on March 18th, 2009 at 10:03 am
This is truly amazing. Not sure about my BS metre, but my FUA metre is certainly hitting the top (brownie points for working out the NSFW acronym).
The websites that produce publications like this should really really think carefully before they post about stuff like this based on research they didn’t read properly. The reason Nielson is so good is because they never comment outside the sphere of their research, and make sure that any data they do produce is founded – unlike eMarketer Daily.
Oddly enough, comments aren’t allowed on eMarketer.
said on March 18th, 2009 at 12:28 pm
I saw this post on Deliverability.Com and made a comment but seeing it here again made me wonder and write about “Why is everybody out to get email?” ( http://is.gd/nQFd )
When the Guardian posted this last week they used Spam as the reason for this shift, but I have yet to see research that shows consumer to consumer email behaviour is changing because of Spam and Spam filtering. If it is out there I would love to see it.
said on March 18th, 2009 at 7:33 pm
A good post and some good comments. ‘New’ is good. ‘New’ is exciting. Moreover ‘new’ has the potential to grab or make headlines and I wonder how much of that is behind the (misreported) death of email that you comment on here Dela.
I enjoyed Skip’s post here (http://emailpractice.blogspot.com/2009/03/why-is-everybody-out-to-get-email.html)
that lists six ‘killers’.
The point I took away from his post is the one that interests me from a personal perspective most of all. And that is integration; email working with direct mail, email working with telephone and other new and emerging channels.
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