As much as I’m enamored by the potential of all the new social media tools such as Twitter, Facebook, and blogs, it’s important to reflect on the one technology that still ties many of these others together. Email, or electronic messaging, has been around in some form for decades, but it wasn’t until the 1980s that standards began to tie together the various systems that had evolved. The 90s saw a sharp increase in usage with ISP’s like AOL getting into the game. Universities have always led the effort as well.

We take it for granted most of the time. Everyone has an email account these days, or at least everyone with an Internet connection, but we’ll talk digital divide another time. The point is that I don’t see email going away anytime soon. Even as new social media sites pop up, I still generally use my email accounts to keep track of all the updates and messages. Nothing compares to email in terms of being able to ignite a word of mouth campaign and empower someone to send direct trusted messages to their network.

In terms of generating a message that resonates with people, we can all take a cue from the Obama team, which managed to keep 13 million subscribers even after the campaign was over. It’s a delicate balance of appropriate messaging and respect for people’s cluttered inboxes and busy lives.

Is it safe? Generally, yes. But it’s important to remember that email is unencrypted and therefore anyone who intercepts it (or has access to one of the many servers your message passes through) could read your mail. There are tools that help you protect your email, but until everyone adopts a new system, we won’t be able to reliably call email “safe.” For now, it’s best just not to send anything through email that’s sensitive. If you must, create a password-protected PDF for the information and attach it to an email.

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Andy Swindler Categories: ePiphany Featured Story, Marketing, Social Media, Technology, Web