Rumors of E-mail’s Death Are Blah Blah Blah…
The sky is falling! E-mail is dying! Or so says Chicken Little, aka Facebook’s chief operating officer, Sheryl Sandberg.
In a much-quoted presentation at the Nielsen Consumer 360 conference yesterday, Sandberg declared that e-mail is going the way of the pterodactyl and the Betamax. Only 11% of teens use e-mail, she noted, and “if you want to know what you’ll be doing tomorrow, look at what teens are doing today.”
Let’s start with the analogy itself. If the adults of today had adopted what my peers and I were doing as teenagers, every office would be swathed in a haze of sweet-smelling smoke, for starters, and more time would be spent dealing with the munchies than anything else. In other words, the habits and preferences one has a teen are not necessarily the same that one has as an adult, because one’s needs and circumstances change. Most teens do not make major purchases online, because they do not have credit cards; does that mean e-commerce is dying?
(Loren McDonald of Silverpop has started a Twitter hashtag, #emailisdeadanalogy, building on this theme, by the way. It’s fun; you should check it out.)
Then there’s the fact that e-mail isn’t merely a personal communication tool; it’s also a marketing channel. Consider postal mail: Yes, people rarely write letters to their friends and family anymore, and yes, many people pay their bills online, so yes, postal volume is down. But postal mail is still a vibrant marketing channel.
What’s more, Sandberg’ misstated the percentage of teen who use e-mail, according to SFGate.com. The 11% refers to the percentage of teens who use e-mail daily to communicate with friends, as per the Pew Institute research referenced. The SFGate.com article notes that “Pew’s focus groups suggest that teens think of email as a tool for communicating with adults and institutions. This means both that counting only communications with friends drags down the figure, and that one should expect teens—who have less official business to conduct—to do less e-mailing than adults.”
And let’s not forget that Facebook itself is a massive user of e-mail. Several industry folks have told me, on a deep-background basis, that Facebook is responsible for up to 40% of the world’s e-mail volume. If that sounds grandiose, consider this: When you click “like” or post a comment on a friend’s status update, you’re notified whenever anyone else posts a follow-up comment. And how are you notified? By e-mail, of course.
June 22nd, 2010 at 12:24 pm
Sherry, well said!
Extreme statements like that of Sheryl Sandberg are effective creating a dialogue and making headlines (great PR for her and more PR for Facebook). Thankfully those in the know can analyze and substantiate the benefits of multichannel marketing.
My teens have ipods, yet they still enjoy listening to the radio (how retro!).
June 23rd, 2010 at 2:17 pm
This wasn’t a casual remark IMHO — people such as this get tons of media coaching. This is all part of the Facebook msg…we’re young and we’re hip blahblah. Why is FB spending so much on deving an email platform if it’s just about dead?
However, it had the desired effect…much like burning a flag on the courthouse steps. Little weight but big thud.
Regards,
jim