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Nielsen Graphic - Time Spent Onlilne

My Grandmother messaged me on Facebook today. Seriously. There was dear grandmother’s picture saying “Hi Billy, Loved the visit with the grand kids, wish you could have been there.” This noble woman has never ever sent me an email. And yet here she is, 80+ years old, socially messaging me and comfortable as ever with the technology and the use. Her wall is rife with exchanges between friends and family.

It is no wonder, then that there has been a lot of chatter on twitter, on industry blogs and here, and in internet trends research recently about the rise of social computing activities and the fall of email.  So it is confusing to me when folks leap to calling email “dead”.  This was the impression among recent discussions of the linked Nielsen online activity reports.  What the reports actually show is that social computing at home on personal computers accounts for more time than email at home on personal computers.  But this is a far cry from email being replace, wholesale, by the likes of Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and a myriad of others.  Indeed, the Nielsen reports actually show that email is far and away the largest consumer of mobile internet time and when you combine time spent online regardless of device, email still “wins”.

Mobile Device Time Spent Online

Now there are some important caveats.  As I have previously posted, I believe that social computing will eventually take over email – even in the workplace.  I happen to think it will happen sometime in 2013 given the trajectory of the downward trend of email and the upward trend of social computing.  As Laurence Hart talks about in his recent article, the E20 tools have a long way to go to overcome the simplicity and ubiquity of email systems – regardless of their many flaws.

So while we all experience more messaging coming through non email channels, email will still be around for some time.

The benefits of E2.0 spread further than you think.

As you saw in a previous post, businesses who adopt E2.0 technologies have potential to expand their company’s ROI. Now, with Oracle’s final report on this study, Enterprise 2.0: Driving Creativity, Productivity and Collaboration, we can see that the benefits of E2.0 extend far beyond monetary value.

Not only do pre-E2.0 technologies take longer to use when employees have to search for information in a number of different spots, but the study found that employees currently have to access over five different applications to complete their weekly tasks. It’s no wonder people feel overloaded with information!

Another finding stated that 40 percent of employees who use social networks in their personal lives said that these ways of communicating are easier to use and understand than those that they use in their workplace. So, when we put two and two together, we can see that the key to E2.0 is about integrating the attractiveness of social networks with the professional environment of a workplace.

By creating an internal wiki or blog, companies can provide their employees with a single place to collaborate with coworkers to get questions answered and conversations noted faster than traditional email-based ways of communicating. Since the majority of users already use social networks in their personal lives, they will already have familiarity with these technologies. Furthermore, using internal blogging or a wiki can help spread valuable knowledge and prevent its loss when employees leave the company.

One last point to drive home: weed out the old when you acquire the new. If companies only add new tools without removing any older ones, they will only end up with silos of repeated information. As explained further in Oracle’s report, businesses need to select only the one or two tools that work the best specifically for their company. This may take some trial and error, but will amount to incredible savings of time and energy when done successfully.

To find out more about how Fishbowl can help you launch your E2.0 networks, email us at 11g@fishbowlsolutions.com.