The Furture of Online Communication, and Marketing

Posted on April 21st, 2009

Is social network communication outpacing email as the leading form of direct online communication? Not yet, but it could. Email has long since been the primary form of regular commnication between individuals and businesses, but as the popularity of social networks like FaceBook, Twitter, Yammer, etc. grow people and companies are offered alternative online forms of communication.

It is doubtful that social media will replace email as the lead form of communication any time soon because email has too many advantages for business related and personal purposes. The downside to social communication is that it lacks privacy. There are business related online social communication tools such as Yammer where companies can perform all internal communication. Like email, this give the ability to track all communication. The problem is that it is only internal. Email has too many advantages to be replace by social communication, especially for business.

Where does this leave email marketing? In the same way, businesses still prefer email as the best for of internal and external communication. Email marketing is still one of the fastest growing forms of media and people are starting to use it more effectively with better templates and landing pages to increase conversions. From a marketing perspective email is very powerful especially from a B2B marketing angle.

Social media marketing however, is growing like wildfire and has many different components. Social media can leverage many different channels and platforms and has the advantage of complete creativity and scalability. The one element that may begin to outpace both email and social media is mobile marketing. Naturally, with the popularity of the iPhone and 3G/4G networks, Internet marketing can lebverage all aspects of mobile communication.

We’ll see how all this develops!