In an age where millions of emails are sent every day it is hard to find someone who hasn’t made a mistake when sending a message.

If you are using Microsoft Outlook and Exchange, you can quickly recall a message and delete unread copies, if you are lucky that is and no one has opened the email. If someone has already opened your errant message, then it’s too late.

Companies have become a bit more cognizant that some employees are just a bit too quick to pull the Send trigger on their mail. To compensate, many have put into place a time delay that gives someone the opportunity to think twice about a message that was sent out and stop it before it is delivered.

Just recently, the New York Times suffered a rather embarrassing incident where they had planned to send a few hundred emails out to some of their subscribers offering them a discounted rate if they did not cancel their subscription. Instead the message went out to over 8 million people.

That was mistake number one.

This was then followed up by a message that read:

“If you received an email today about canceling your NYT subscription, ignore it. It’s not from us”

sent out via Twitter. So they were blaming the mistake on someone else, a spammer perhaps.

But, as it was later discovered, the Times was the guilty party. They did send the initial message and then pawned off the responsibility.

Where the mistake hurt

This gaffe wound up costing the Times. Not only was their reputation hurt, but so was their bank account.

Since a discounted rate was promised to the few hundred who were thinking of cancelling their subscription to the Times, other customers felt slighted. Their loyalty, so it seemed, accounted for little reward.

To make up for it, the Times extended the discount to everyone who received the errant email, but only for part of a day. By the afternoon of their offer, they had put a halt to the discounted rates. This decision then led to a Twitter account called @NYTSpam that made fun of the error fully disclosing that it was a:

“Parody account. Not affiliated with @NYTimes or actual spammers — just sick of bad digital strategy.”

The account currently has over 200 followers.

The Times is not alone when it comes to paying the price for a bad email going public. These things actually happen all the time. But when it happens to a small business, we don’t really hear about it.

To keep the lid on scandals and humiliation that can be suffered due to email, it is important that you cover certain things with your employees.

Anyone who emails on behalf of the company should understand the following:

1. Never send an email when you are angry or emotional. This leads to things being said that you may want to take back.
2. Write, edit, send. Never type out an email and hit the send button without reading it over. Not only for spelling and grammar errors that could hurt your reputation, but also for the tone of the email. People read into things and if the tone is not what you intend it could lead to problems later.
3. Check your list. This ties in directly to the Times situation. Make sure that you are sending your email message to the right people. This becomes more important with so many organizations automatically populating the TO and CC fields as you type names. Make sure that you don’t rely simply on the names suggested to you. Be careful using the Reply to All as well.
4. Never punish or praise in an email message. Not only can the content of an email be misconstrued because of a lack of emotion, but it can also become evidence or public record. If you fail to follow human resources procedures, email can be a pretty solid form of documentation.
5. Don’t share company secrets via email. Whether they be financial, trade or even personal secrets they should never be relayed through an email message. It is far too easy for someone to accidentally, or purposefully, forward that message on to others.

Common Mistakes When Sending Emails

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Estimates show Twitter to have over 300 million users. Facebook is close to 1 billion and Google+ keeps growing every day.

Add to the mix all of the smaller, niche social networks and those numbers continue to climb.

Take into account that all of these platforms offer some type of messaging client you can see why some people can so confidently make the claim that email is dead.

But despite the popularity of instant messaging through social networks, text messages and Tweets, email remains a powerful force. Powerful enough that VisibleGains, a video marketing company, confidently makes the claim that email is here to stay in a recent infographic that they created.

Talking the Talk and Walking the Walk

So Facebook has 750,000,000 friends chatting back and forth over walls and instant messages to the tune of 60,000,000 every day, and Twitter boasts 300,000,000 users sending out communiqués via 140 character blurbs 140,000,000 times every day.

And as for email? Email can stake a claim of 2,900,000,000 accounts sending upwards of 188,000,000,000 messages every day. That’s right, there are three times more email accounts than there are Facebook accounts.

Numbers too big to wrap your head around? Let’s look at these figures on a more personal level:

• The average number of Twitter updates for each account is .47 a day
• Facebook accounts average .08 updates in a 24 hour period
• The average email user sends 64.8 messages per day.

So not only are there more email accounts, but the use of these accounts far outshines the use Twitter and Facebook. In reality, the comparative use numbers aren’t even close enough to present any meaningful threat at this point.

But the big social networks are growing at such a rapid pace that it won’t be too long before one of them passes up email as the primary means of online communication, right?

Not so fast. While no one can argue that using social media for communication is booming, email is still growing as well. In fact, the number of email messages sent in 2010 was up 19% from 2009.

And as for spam taking up a large percentage of email messages, that is something that should definitely be taken into account. Spam does skew the numbers a bit, but considering spam sent via email is at an all time low as scammers and online criminals focus more on deploying spam over the various social channels, this argument may just reinforce the claim that email use is more alive and well than ever before.

Moving Forward

According to their inforgraphic, VisibleGains makes the claim that by the year 2014 there will be 3.8 billion email accounts worldwide and close to half of them, 47%, will be located in Asia and the Pacific.

But when we talk about the future of email, those who will be using it in the future should be consulted shouldn’t they? After all, teens detest email right? To them text speak and Facebook pokes are much more meaningful methods of communication than a long, drawn out email. At least that is what some will have you believe.

Yet when teenagers were asked the question, “will email live on?” only 15% believe that email is dead. 41% didn’t know (or didn’t care) but 44% agreed that email will in fact live on.

Analyzing the Numbers

Even with so many different options for communication out there that are much easier to use, email remains supreme because it is viewed as a professional medium; and in the world of business, projecting a professional image still trumps ease of use.

Yet one aspect of business may be the one thing that moves social communication closer to emails numbers, and that is marketing.

As filters effectively separate junk marketing emails from the inbox the social platforms become more attractive to marketers. Spreading their messages over these networks has increased tremendously over the years and looks to continue to expand as search engine algorithms make social metrics more and more important to their results. Even still, email still has little to worry about.

Should We Say Goodbye To Email?

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Despite businesses looking to move away from email in favor of real-time communication tools, email still remains the most common method for sending messages electronically. In fact its use is growing.

But even though email has established a home in the workplace, there is always room for improvement.

In a commentary for ZDNet, Avinoam Nowogrodski, the co-founder and CEO of Clarizen, wrote about how email can be even more productive in the workplace.

“Email is not going away even though other communication tools have risen up. It’s still a challenge to make it more productive,” Nowogrodski stated. This can be done by transforming email from just a communications tool into a productivity tool that can be used as, the central dashboard to manage and complete work each day”.

How can this be done?

Being the CEO of a company that sells project management solutions, Nowogrodski certainly has reason to see email be used more as a productivity tool by businesses. This can be done, he explains, by changing how we look at our inbox.

Instead of thinking of the inbox as a place that houses messages and spam, we need to look to it as a place for:

• Information management
• Contact management
• Project management

Information management

Most email clients have a rudimentary information management system built into them. They are called folders. However folders aren’t built

When addressing information management it becomes clear that that Nowogrodski has an agenda. After all, his company sells tools to help businesses manage workflows and projects more efficiently. Almost immediately, he refers to third party platforms that sit on top of email solutions to not only help manage important emails, but also help connect people and information.

Tools like these can help filter messages from certain addresses or with certain keywords. When these messages are received, the recipient can be alerted via SMS, Twitter or a number of other tools. This helps to keep workers focused on tasks instead of constantly checking inboxes for important messages.

Contact management

Again, add-ons are mentioned as a way to keep workers productive. Here, Nowodrodski mentions the time consuming task of manually entering and updating contact information. Rather than typing in each one, he suggests using a tool that will create, and update, contacts for the user relying on connections through services like LinkedIn or even Twitter to provide information.

Work management

Calendars and task lists that come with email software are often left untouched in favor of more robust project management tools. Clarizen, however, focuses on a solution that allows users to update tasks, make contributions to a project, leave comments or notes and tie related communications together making the entire process more collaborative.

While these tips look rather promising, businesses that don’t find themselves in a position to purchase additional products to sit on top of their email clients shouldn’t have to feel that their employees’ use of email needs to be a waste of time.

On the contrary, there are many ways that companies without the budget for such solutions can still make the most out of email.

Learn to use the existing features of your email client

While email clients often don’t provide the rich features that add-ons do, knowing what your email software can do should be the first step in helping your workers use email to its fullest potential.

Making sure that at least two members of your team are properly trained is a start, but making sure that these people have the ability to train others is equally important.

Schedule email checking

Instead of purchasing applications that notify users as to when an important email has arrived, companies without the capital to spend can enforce schedules for employees.

This not only keeps workers from wasting time constantly checking their inbox, but it ensures that those who don’t check for new messages on a regular basis don’t miss important communications.

Use filters

Just about every email client on the market has a method for filtering messages via sender, subject or content, so that they can be sorted and organized. This is probably the easiest and least expensive way for employees to take back control of their email and be more productive.

While third-party add-ons may make it easier for workers to be more productive, those companies who cannot purchase these solutions can often have the same effect with a little bit of creativity.

I would be interested in seeing some thoughts from the readers as to the solutions they, or their company, have put into place to help make email a more productive tool.

How Email Can Be More Productive

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It seems like everywhere you go the topic of Google+ vs. Facebook hits you smack in the face. No pun intended.

Much of this debate stems from the reliance of so many people using social tools as their primary method of communication and content curation.

This trend is so popular, in fact, that many people have predicted that social channels will replace email as the primary means of communication.

But before we all make a mad rush to dump our inboxes for Twitter, a new study from the Pew Research Center shows that email is still one of the most popular activities on the Internet.

A look at the numbers

In 2002, when Pew began their yearly study of Internet use, only 49 percent of all people used email daily. In 2011, that number has ballooned to 65 percent.

While it is easy to make the case that the number of people online has grown exponentially in the past nine years as well, that doesn’t easily explain why email use has grown so much.

After all, the methods of communication have grown at a far greater rate than the number of people online in the same time period.

Let’s look at 2002. At that time people communicated through email, chat, instant messaging and forums. There were early adopters of other technologies that we will look at in a minute but for the most part, the majority of communication was done over these mediums.

Now in 2011 there is still email, instant messaging and some forum use. Chat has slowed down to a crawl, but it has been replaced by text messaging, social networks, Twitter (and other micro blogging services) and blog commenting.

So with the pool of communication tools widened, why is it that email is still so popular? Scratch that, why is it that email use continues to grow?

A look at the landscape

Over the years, business communication has changed. Your co-workers are no longer down the hall or a cubicle away. Companies have offices all over the world. Remote workers, consultants and freelancers are often called upon to fill voids in the corporate structure to bring in additional support or save money.

Work is also outsourced on a much more frequent basis to people an ocean away from your headquarters.

While businesses have been quick to adopt the strategies mentioned above, they are still slow to consider social media as a viable business tool. The impressions that most decision makers have is that social tools are toys that high school and college aged kids use to wreck their future career opportunities. They are seen as another distraction; a way for employees to waste time and cut back on productivity.

To keep people on task, and prevent too much information from getting out, social communication tools are often banned in the workplace. So the employee is faced with two options.

1. Skirt the rules and bypass content filtering tools to use social media at work.
2. Use the tools that are in place for effective communication, email.

Another look at the statistics

It is commonly thought that the younger workforce goes with option 1 from above. Tech savvy enough to get around any blocks combined with a youthful arrogance often makes IT and management keep an eye out for any policy breaches.

Surprisingly, those aged 19 to 29 were at the top of the list when it came to daily email use. 64 percent reported using email once a day while 30 to 49 year olds came in at 63 percent.

Income also seemed to play a big role in how often you used email. Households that report income over $75,000 a year claim to access their email on a daily basis at 78 percent followed by 67 percent of people who make between $50,000 to $74,999 per year. Those making less than $30,000 per year have the lowest percentage of daily email use at 47 percent.

What do all these numbers mean?

As email administrators, our jobs are still valued.

But that also means that the responsibility of maintaining the availability of email communication across your organization is more important than ever, and as email use continues to rise so will the expectations placed on us.

Email is Still Most Popular

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Email not giving up its crown yet.

Email no longer rules, declared a headline in a recent issue of the Wall Street Journal. Email has fallen from its throne as the king of wired communication, the author reasoned, because social media, like Facebook and Twitter, offer communicators a more immediate way to share their thoughts, situations and creative endeavors with others. However, while it’s true that email’s monopoly on communication is no more, that doesn’t mean it has relinquished its crown as the wallah of wired information exchange. In fact, social media, rather than snatching email’s diadem, have actually polished it.

Anyone with a Twitter or Facebook account knows how much “noise” those services generate. The compulsion by many users of those media to gush minutiae can be numbing. When email was the sole source of online communication, complaints abounded about information overload. That has only worsened with the likes of Twitter and Facebook. Email, though, as a mature technology, has developed ways to cope with noise. Filters sort messages as they arrive. Folders segregate items into bins where they can be logically acted on. Tags and categories further slice and dice clutter. Those things add value to email. By comparison, Twitter and Facebook can feel as if the postman drove a dump truck up to your house and jettisoned a year’s worth of mail on your lawn.

According to the WSJ writer, email is a quaint technology that reflects how people used to use the net. It’s made, she argued, for logging on, downloading and logging off. Social media, she continued, is more attuned to the “always on” connections people have today; this is a very peculiar contention. If anything, the spread of “always on” has been a boon for email. Checking email in bursts was never convenient. Now email programs can remain open from boot-up to shutdown and mail automatically gathered and delivered to an inbox. Moreover, many users are more likely to have their email application open all the time than to be camped at a social networking site. That’s why those sites offer the option of sending email notifications to their members when they receive a personal message or when a discussion they’re interested in is updated. Email quaint? Someone should let the folks at Research In Motion, makers of the Blackberry and who continue to make silos of money on that quaint technology, in on that development.

One assertion by the WSJ scribe that’s hard to refute is that the pretenders to email’s lofty status are fun to use. That alone, though, is hardly threatening to email. Fun has entertainment value, but when what a communicator needs conveyed has more than entertainment value, it’s hard to beat email. What would you take more seriously: a 140-character text message written in gibberish or a 200-word email with all the T’s crossed and I’s dotted?

Why wait for email to be delivered when a correspondent can be contacted immediately through Instant Messaging?, asked the WSJ scribbler. That kind of thinking, though, assumes the correspondent wants to drop whatever he or she is doing to instantly respond to you. Instant Messaging can be a meddlesome application. Email, on the other hand, is less intrusive and less likely to irritate than IM. In addition, one has to wonder just how many instant messages require instant responses, or are just sent because a user is more concerned with speed than common sense.

No Wall Street Journal story would be complete without numbers, and this author has some to show email’s decline from favor. She noted that in August 2009, email users climbed 21 percent to 276.9 million users over August a year ago. During the same period, users on social networking and community sites jumped 31 percent to 301.5 million. Do raw numbers translate into increased value?  Most people use email every day for work. So it’s very likely that most of those 276.9 million users are actually using email. On the other hand, how many members of social networks even check out their sites every day? And if they do, how much time do they spend there? If one has an application open on the desktop and is using it all day long, does that application have more or less value than an application that’s used only occasionally? What’s more, a user will have one email program, but may belong to multiple social networks. So while that person counts as a single user of email, he or she could count as multiple users of social networks, thus skewing the growth numbers.

Email no longer rules? Not quite. The new generation of communication services have their place, but it’s mostly removing chaff that detracted from the value of email. Pithy messages that clogged email boxes can be relegated to text messages from mobile phones, a twit or a posting to a Facebook wall. For high value communication, for communication that’s important, email remains king.

Email still king despite pretenders

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A blog entry on Twitter yesterday confirmed that an outside party gained unauthorized access to Twitter. Although the blog entry notes that no account information was altered or removed, there were at least ten individual accounts that were viewed.

A more detailed report on Information Week provides a little more meat to the issue. Apparently, it began when a Twitter product manager’s Yahoo! mail account was hacked, using the same password recovery hack that was used to compromise Sarah Palin’s email account. Shortly after, someone known as “Hacker Croll” posted screenshots of Twitter’s administrative console on the Web, including admin information about Barack Obama’s  and Britney Spears’ accounts. The attacker explains on his post that access to Twitter was gained through the Twitter administrator’s Yahoo! account by resetting the secret question. The mailbox contained a message with the Twitter password, which gave the hacker access to Twitter. 

This is just one more example of why you should never use public email like Yahoo! for official or sensitive business of any sort.

Twitter hack was achieved by hacking Yahoo mail first

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Have any of your end users asked you about using microblogging services such as Twitter, Yammer, SocialTextSignals, Socialcast or Present.ly?

If not then you should consider yourself one step ahead of your end users. We’ve all been hearing about Twitter especially during President Obama’s recent address to Congress back in February. And if you follow Twitter at all then you’ve probably heard about the “Cisco Fatty” story of the young twitterer who tweeted that she would hate her work at a job that was recently offered to her by Cisco.

These microblogging services offer a way to send messages via a real-time short messaging service that works over multiple networks and devices. On Twitter, the messages must be under 140 characters in length and can be sent via mobile texting, instant message, or the web.

Earlier last month, Google CEO Eric Schmidt had this to say about the microblogging service Twitter:

“Speaking as a computer scientist, I view all of these as a sort of poor man’s email systems. In other words, they have aspects of an email system, but they don’t have a full offering. To me, the question about companies like Twitter is: Do they fundamentally evolve as sort of a note phenomenon, or do they fundamentally evolve to have storage, revocation, identity, and all the other aspects that traditional email systems have? Or do email systems themselves broaden what they do to take on some of that characteristic?”

The way I see it is that the microblogging services have a couple of different evolution paths: they can choose not to compete with email and instead grow as a “complementary” service to email, they can compete and offer the same services as email (To, From, Bcc, Subject, Reply, Attachments, Formats, etc) or they can evolve along their own terms and let other companies provide the bridges and gateways from microblogging services to traditional email.

I know that in my day to day operations it’s not unusual for me to be on a conference call,  on a speaker phone, and be sending emails while answering instant messages from others who need a quick one or two word answer to a question such as “are you available to talk right now?”

The difference between IM and microblogging is that microblogging is more of a one to many medium whereas IM is mainly used for one to one though it is possible to include others in the communications. Email can be either.

I think email admins should start planning how they will eventually manage and secure future versions of their corporate email systems that are capable of real-time microblogging services.

Will Microblogging Replace Email?

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