Email Still Matters for Communication Purposes

I was amused to read in today’s tweet stream that email still mat­ters, as Jere­miah notes here (screen­shot above).

As a prac­ti­cal indi­ca­tor of social media adop­tion, I’ve been look­ing for signs of how Twit­ter is used by peo­ple within my busi­ness net­works, and in par­tic­u­lar, by my clients. My non-scientific research sug­gests that email, phone calls, or in-person meet­ings still dra­mat­i­cally out­weigh the use of Twit­ter in the busi­ness com­mu­ni­ca­tions and inter­ac­tions I see on a day-to-day basis. What’s inter­est­ing about this is that my clients are all in the high-tech arena. Within this com­mu­nity Twit­ter has not yet reached the tip­ping point of net­work effects to man­date its use as a required com­mu­ni­ca­tions vehicle…

Note that I’m not talk­ing about brands’ use of Twit­ter for cus­tomer com­mu­ni­ca­tions or cus­tomer care (whether inbound or out­bound). I’m focus­ing on people-to-people com­mu­ni­ca­tions here, for busi­ness con­ver­sa­tions. The essence of social interactions.

When meet­ing new col­leagues for the first time busi­ness peo­ple still pre­dom­i­nantly give out their office and/or mobile phone num­bers, their email address, per­haps their office loca­tion — but not their Twit­ter account — when exchang­ing busi­ness cards or con­tact info. When I ask admin­is­tra­tive staff for a new client or colleague’s con­tact info, PAs and exec admins pro­vide phone num­bers and email addresses but no Twit­ter han­dles. I’m still wait­ing to see Twit­ter con­tact info show up in people’s email signatures.

The usual excep­tion to this is con­tact info sup­plied by ana­lysts, con­sul­tants or speak­ers whose pri­mary rev­enues come from activ­i­ties that pro­mote social media adop­tion or ser­vices for orga­ni­za­tional change man­age­ment to make enter­prises “socially ready.” These are peo­ple who have a directly vested inter­est in accel­er­at­ing social media adop­tion, let’s be honest.

This makes me con­clude that for those of us not liv­ing on the bleed­ing edge of social media, earn­ing our liv­ing as “social experts,” email or phones are still more reli­able for con­tact­ing and inter­act­ing with other busi­ness peo­ple, assum­ing you have some prior relationship.

And in my mind for some­thing to merit the name “social,” there needs to be some sort of cur­rent or poten­tial rela­tion­ship, even if it’s just embry­onic or pro­vi­sional. Said oth­er­wise, if you’re just tweet­ing in hopes that some­one inter­est­ing will take note of your mes­sages, the expe­ri­ence feels like flycasting.

Lately, my expe­ri­ence of Twit­ter, from a signal-to-noise POV, has caused me to reduce my usage, but not as a con­scious deci­sion. Not only has my own tweet­ing dropped down, I don’t launch Tweet­deck or Tweetie as often as before. This has resulted from a whole series of prag­matic mini-decisions, moment-to-moment time opti­miza­tions. To date Twit­ter has been a fun exper­i­ment, but not yet essen­tial for my pro­fes­sional con­ver­sa­tions or client interactions.

Once peo­ple in my busi­ness net­work start to rely more heav­ily on it, I’ll be happy to use Twit­ter more reg­u­larly. In the mean­time it tends to be a dis­trac­tion that gets in the way of “real work.” Hav­ing said that, I still check Twit­ter every day or so,  in hopes of find­ing the  rare gems, those tweets that point to rel­e­vant arti­cles, blog posts, pre­sen­ta­tions or other resources I would oth­er­wise have missed. Those serendip­i­tous lucky finds…

I’ve dis­cov­ered I can go a day or more with­out check­ing Twit­ter, with­out any neg­a­tive con­se­quences. One of these days, that will prob­a­bly change. But for now, adop­tion still lags behind the promise and cer­tainly the deaf­en­ing hype that sur­rounds it.

Why is Twit­ter adop­tion lag­ging in my pro­fes­sional cir­cles? Per­haps because our con­ver­sa­tions and inter­ac­tions focus on con­tent that’s not appro­pri­ate for pub­lic dis­clo­sure, or they’re con­ducted among a man­age­able (and known) set of par­tic­i­pants. Although oth­ers might want to eaves­drop on these con­ver­sa­tions, there’s no good rea­son to make the con­tents more pub­lic. In fact there may be NDA agree­ments that block us from shar­ing more broadly, and thus, Twit­ter usage could expose us to legal risks. Iron­i­cally, the most com­pelling usage of Twit­ter that I can think of, for our pur­poses, would be some form of “narrow-casting” out­reach to peo­ple we don’t yet know, but who may have inter­ests or needs in com­mon with ours.

So I’m still wait­ing for that tip­ping point in my pro­fes­sional net­work, the moment when tweet­ing becomes an essen­tial form of com­mu­ni­ca­tion, indis­pens­able to our inter­ac­tions. Until then I con­fess I’m suf­fer­ing “Twit­ter fatigue.”

Tagged as: business communications, client interactions, email communications, Twitter adoption

Revised on June 4, 2010