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 a chart as evidence of this staggering claim.

I found that 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 comes 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

Comments

Great post. There are a number of things interesting about this story. First as Dela points out they got it so wrong.

Perhaps the simple answer is that the average consumer is doing what we all recommend - use the channel that is most convenient to the recipient. Put another way, don't use SMS to chat with your granny.

The second interesting thing is that this story ran last Monday in The Guardian - I would have expected eMarketer Daily to be a bit more, you know daily.