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Email Overload and the rise and fall of social networking

Two more reports now suggest that social media as an alternative to email is not growing as fast as it should: Radicati Group’s latest industry survey and informal research from Brian Solis.  This despite the fact that Facebook and Twitter usage continues to grow.  Meanwhile for business, as IBM found, email is still the preferred media.  Even although the IBM study found that 48% of respondents felt they suffered from email overload.

Why is this?  One explanation might be the Generation X and Y.  By and large business is still tilted towards more Generation X employees many of whom are not comfortable with social media and have not been educated how to use it properly.  A second explanation might be that all alerts about new information on social media/social networks still comes by email.  This in turn drives up the email traffic.  One way to manage this aspect of email overload is to create rules to divert all such alerts away from the inbox and to a folder.

However that still leaves the need to educate Generation X.

What do you think?

Tags: email management, email overload, email stress

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