October 16, 2008

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eMail is for old people (and that includes me I guess) - the end of eMail as a social tool? I am 47 and I just realized something (probably belatedly so) that I think is important to share with you: the Digital Natives [Wikipedia explains] the Net Generation, the 10-27 year-olds, don't use email like we do. For them, emailing means business, parents, government and other unfortunately unavoidable stuff. If they want to communicate (and that means 2-way now), they will twitter each other, leave messages on Facebook or Myspace, Orkut, Cyworld, StudiVZ, Mixi, or subscribe to each other's blog feeds or follow each other on Friendfeed (well.. yes, mostly the geeky ones), or chat on IM, via QQ or talk / video-talk on Skype, or SMS each other (worth $100 Billion in 2007). Even more importantly, they share stuff in order to im- and explicitly communicate to each other by aligning with personalized content that shows who they are, such as posting and commenting on youtube, sharing pictures on Flickr, bookmarking stuff they find on delicious, sharing slideshows and presentations on Slideshare, music recommendations on Last.fm and iLike... and so on. eMail is way too formal, too direct, too organized, too PUSH for them, and is usually used more in the same way that we 'older' people used the fax or even good old snail mail. And the age range that deserts email as a social tool is increasing every week - this is one of the reasons why I recently junked my monthly email newsletter: it had become pretty much like flogging a dead horse, there was no conversation, no 2-way process. This trend makes a huge difference for marketing and selling stuff online (or... rather, period): you don't get to push to these people anymore, you must PULL. You must get them to befriend you on the social networks, sign up for your RSS feed, follow you...

Gerd Leonhard

Keynote Speaker, Think-Tank Leader, Futurist, Author & Strategist, Idea Curator, some say Iconoclast | Heretic, CEO TheFuturesAgency, Visiting Prof FDC Brazil, Green Futurist

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