Since the social business movement has grown in popularity, email has become something of the ugly duckling of professional communication. It’s almost seen as a dirty way of conversing with someone, with advocates suggesting that email should be done away with in favour of more open and collaborative methods, such as an enterprise social network.
Of course, for most professionals, that hasn’t happened at all. Even within organizations that have enterprise social networks, email remains the primary means of communication. A recent report by Cisco into communication within the public sector in Asia has confirmed that email is still king when it comes to internal comms.
The report saw over 100 senior officials from governments in Australia, Malaysia, India and Singapore quizzed as to their communication styles and preferences. You can see from the chart below that email remains top of the pile in terms of importance, outscoring both internet and intranet.
Maybe it’s time to appreciate that email is unlikely to go away completely and to begin being a little bit more accepting of it as a medium of communication?
I'm not at all surprised. The public sector has never been very progressive, has it?
Adi, I am firm believer that email remains key… period! Public sector, private sector, non-for-profit or whatever, email is still a powerful tool to reach people directly in their inbox. As long as content remains relevant and timely, which is not always the case obviously, then I don't see a better tool from a relationship marketing standpoint. It needs to work in conjunction with other tools, such as website, social media, intranet and so on, but I still see it in the equation for a couple of years at least… 🙂
Cheers from Quebec City,
Frederic
I do wonder at times if the bulk of the anti-email argument has come primarily from people offering an alternative (the enterprise social network vendors)