Recently Tech News World cited a Nielsen report that indicated social networking and blogging are now more popular online activities than using email:
The statistics are hardly surprising, Jonathan Stark of Jonathan Stark Consulting told the E-Commerce Times. “Email was the killer app for the ’90s — it brought the Internet out of the geek realm to the grandma realm.”
In the 2000s, social networking is picking up where email left off, he said. Surprisingly, though, there are still large pockets of Internet users who have not embraced the social networking trend.
“I know people in tech even that still resist taking the plunge — they think it is a time waster when, in fact, it is the opposite,” Stark observed.
Indeed, one of the reasons for the medium’s popularity is its efficiency in communication.
“It is more efficient than sending out emails, which basically a one-to-one form of communication,” noted Stark.
That efficiency is what’s driving social networking’s popularity as an internal corporate communication tool, Jennifer Lindsay, director of digital services and social media evangelist with Eastwick Communications, told the E-Commerce Times.
“For a business with a heavy new business pipeline, social networks can retain information; they can be a starting point to assign team members that may not have been part of the pitch, for example. Social networks are the perfect way to capture the mind share of the individual and share it across the organization,” she explained.
Email, by contrast, doesn’t capture knowledge transfer, noted Lindsay.
Wow, can our businesses afford not to take notice?
