Will Microblogging Surpass Email?

By: Dean Nicolls | Posted: 2010-02-03

In a recent Economic Times’ article, Gartner predicted that by 2014, social networking services will replace email as the primary vehicle for interpersonal communications. The research firm also said that nearly half of the companies globally will start using microblogging streams like Twitter in two years.  

Clearly, social media can play a larger role within most organizations since it is an effective means of communicating more immediate information like status updates and your whereabouts. 

Add to this, recent research, suggests that workers may be better served if they use social networking and instant messaging to remain in close contact with one another. Researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and IBM investigated the online activities (including e-mail, social networking, and instant messaging) of 2,600 anonymous IBM employees. From the research, they concluded that those who remain in close contact with their superiors generate, on average, over $600 more revenue a month than those who perform their work without frequently checking in with higher-ups. The report stated that the employees "would be rendered less effective without a clear direction." Go figure.

If you ask me -- email, instant messages and microblogging will all happily co-exist (as each serves a distinct role) – but these new social media channels will not necessarily replace or reduce the importance of email.  I think a more likely scenario is that many of these social features will become part of your email experience.  Check out Nick’s blog post from last October where he touched on the same themes involving email’s (premature) imminent demise.

Given that Microsoft, Google and a cadre of other heavy-hitters are investing billions in unified communications we think email will continue to reign king for some time – though it will evolve into a much more integrated experience, encompassing social media.  

At LiveOffice, we embrace these new technologies and will continue to find simple and practical ways to archive these new message streams since so much business intelligence resides there – whether it be within a tweet, blog post, IM or plain ole email message.