How Important is Email?
Last week, InformationWeek published the results of an interesting survey of 10,000 IncrediMail customers that pointed out just how important email is to our daily lives:
- 54% would rather give up chocolate for one day than email
- 50% would give up coffee (Seattle area respondents must not have understood the question) :)
- 41% would give up television
- 15% would rather give up their spouse/significant other than email
- 4% have fired someone through email
Clearly, email is absolutely critical to most of us -- our own research shows that email use is increasing by 17-20% annually. However, what some may label as an addiction I believe is more often akin to resourcefulness and utility in finding new ways to use existing infrastructure. For example, with a single email I can communicate with someone, establish a legal record of the communication and build the corporate knowledge base that others can search quite easily. That just isn't the case with the telephone or most other forms of communication.
While I believe it's true that email can become an addiction, I'm not sure it is for most of us. Your thoughts?
posted by Michael D. Osterman at
4/24/2007 12:12:00 AM
2 Comments:
Although email is not quite as additing as IM, email is still addicting. The idea of actually being able to think about what you're saying before you "say" it, but yet still be able to have an ongoing coversation with someone usually results in more productive and intelligent dialogue. (Atleast most of the time.)
There's this great book out about Email etiquette that might be of interest to you, it's called "Send" and it just talks about how people use email in this day and age. It's a quick and easy read and I'm sure will come in handy as email becomes more and more prevalent...
April 27, 2007 12:21 PM
Great post...and the number are quite interesting.
But I have a comment about what you said below:
"For example, with a single email I can communicate with someone, establish a legal record of the communication and build the corporate knowledge base that others can search quite easily. That just isn't the case with the telephone or most other forms of communication.
I would have to disagree with you on this item as I am not sure how you can build a corporate knowledge base when e-mail is a 1:1 (or whoever is on the 'to:' list). And, I am not sure how others are searching your e-mail inbox (I am using Lotus Notes so maybe your e-mail client allows you to do this).
I would think that a forum/blog/wiki would be better technology to build the corporate knowledge base.
I look forward to your reply.
Many thanks,
M
May 2, 2008 1:51 PM
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