There is lots of talk about email going away: some are swearing completely off of email, others complain about how many messages they receive in their inbox, others use only email.  Our own research shows that for many corporate workers, the importance of email continues to grow.  Add to all of this the continuing discussions about migrating from GroupWise to “Outlook” (the subject of an upcoming blog post), how Notes/Domino is losing share to Exchange, etc.

However, what does it really matter?  The fundamental goal of email when it was invented decades ago was to enable people to communicate in a more efficient way.  That goal has never changed, but the tools that are available to corporate decision makers to enable that efficiency have.  For example, we now have social tools that can enable communication in a way that enables easier access to and analysis of employee and customer sentiment.  We have collaboration tools that make it easier for groups to work on a document instead of sending a file to everyone via email.  We have text messaging and instant messaging that enable bursty types of communication that are more efficient than email.

Spending time at Lotusphere last week reinforced my view that IBM, more than many other vendors, really understands the new paradigm.  To them it’s not so much about Notes/Domino losing share to Exchange (which, on a worldwide basis, is questionable anyway given that there are more Domino servers under management than at any time in the company’s history) or cloud vs. on-premise or social media vs. email.  Instead, it’s about how communications is evolving into a new platform that integrates social into the business fabric – integrating new paradigms with the old where it makes sense to do so.  It’s about a shift in corporate culture that doesn’t focus on siloes of information, but instead uses a variety of communication modes in a way that makes the most sense.  For example, email need not – and should not – succumb to social media, but instead evolve into a tool that enables integration of various communication types that makes sense given a particular organization’s culture, regulatory environment, today’s customer base, future customer base, the geographic distribution of its employees and other factors.

The bottom line is that email – and every other mode of electronic communication – is about how to let employees and customers communicate, collaborate, learn, change and act in a way that makes sense.  Those who get caught up in the email vs. social media vs. Web 2.0 vs. cloud vs. on-premise vs. whatever else discussion are often missing the bigger picture:  this is much more about business and efficiency, not so much about technology.

OR Commentary for Messaging Wire

Week of January 23, 2012

Outside of the financial services industry, very few companies actually monitor what their employees say on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn or any of the 1,000+ other social media sites around the world.  Few companies scan short URLs for potential links to malware sites.  Few have deployed systems to protect against spam delivered via social media.  Few have deployed systems to capture whatever business records or other important content might be posted to social media sites.

In a way, social media use in the vast majority of organizations is like email was back around 1997 – not much in the way of anti-spam, anti-malware, content filtering or archiving is in place to protect organizations from all sorts of harm. Use social media today and – at least from the perspective of how protected you’ll be against spam and malware – you can recreate your email experience from yesteryear.

Should you be concerned about?  Yes:

· Facebook says that about 4% of its content is spam and Twitter said that 1.5% of its tweets were spam-like in 2010 (numbers not dissimilar to email spam figures back in the mid- to late 1990s).  However, Imperium estimates that 400 million Facebook are victims of social spam each day.

· Last week, malware stole login credentials for 45,000 Facebook accounts – a small proportion of the approximately 800 million accounts in use today – but 45,000 nonetheless.

· Imperium estimates that 40% of the social profiles in existence today are frauds.

· Our own research indicates that only a small proportion of organizations are archiving their social media content, despite the fact that some of this content is potentially actionable or might be subject to legal or regulatory scrutiny at some point.

Clearly, there is a problem: lots of malware and spam floating around, millions of tweets and posts that probably should be archived, and few companies doing anything about it.

We are in the process of writing a white paper that addresses these topics, and will be launching a major study within the week on how social media is used and perceived, and what organizations are doing to protect themselves.  Let us know if you’re interested in what we will be finding from the research.

OR Commentary for Messaging Wire

Week of January 16, 2012