As a communicator, the tools you use to reach your audience are of vital importance.
Over the past ten years we’ve all moved more of our communication to e-mail, but the rise of e-mail’s popularity has been matched by it’s infection with spam and viruses. We’ve actually reached a stage where the balance of communication is swinging back towards the old reliables like the telephone.
This of course isn’t exactly new. If you really need to contact someone in a timely manner, the phone is my first port of call. I suspect it’s the same for most people.
E-mail isn’t dead but I suspect the type of communication being carried over e-mail is changing – more background information and less conversational communication. Enter Instant messaging (with a log) and RSS.
What’s amazing is some of the statistics being published about just how broken e-mail is.
PC Magazine have a feature entitled: “Can E-mail Survive?“:
- Postini, an e-mail� filtering service which processes 150 to 200 million messages a day, reckons spam accounts for more than half of all e-mail traffic.
- MessageLabs trapped more than a million SoBig messages in the first 24 hours and they estimate that the volume of e-mail infected with viruses is growing at 85%. Furthermore they estimate that over 60% of spam is now being sent by computers infected by viruses unknown to the user….
“We’ve seen a trend back toward voice mail,” says Tony Scott, GM’s CTO for information systems and services. “[People] know that urgent e-mail messages can get lost in all the spam.”
Murphy's Law 