Email, as it is now, is of little real use.

Most messages get bounced back due to incorrect input. Often the boxes are full or abandoned as people will change their email and without a net form of NCOA (National Change of Address), you don’t know where they have gone to.

There is still no method to know who is who and who is where like you get with physical addresses. And that will always be the big issue with current email. It is akin to sending smoke signals. Maybe people will see it, maybe the wind will blow it away.

And if you use email lists, you either get junk, old emails or you are thought of as a spammer.

Even if you make a good site, get people to come, capture their info, market them in a good way; people change their email addresses (often like socks) and you lose contact with them. Especially if they are not web savvy and keep no permanent address like their own domain. It does no good if the email you started with was bingo1997@aol.com and every year it changes to bingo1998, 1999, 2000, etc. And there are people that do that!

Having a good site, blog, social account and making it valuable even when you don’t want to sell a service or good; is the sure way to keep them. They come to YOU and keep YOU updated because they see value in YOU. On the flip side, YOU have to keep them entertained, informed and cultivate a relationship with them. That means time, data management and focus.

Most companies don’t WANT to do that as it means money. Yet it is critical to do it in this consumer economy. It is no different than the old days when a grocer would know every customer by name, knew their spouse, their kids and what they buy or need all the time. That made it personal. And the customer would share updates on what they were up to, how the week was going, if the kids were doing well in school. And the merchant remembered it and ran with it.

That means sites that ARE social. Ones where it is not just the company talking AT you, but WITH you. Faceless conglomerates will not do as well as connected, personal ones.

Email, right now, cannot be tracked as easily as daily or weekly visits from your customers.

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So who actually uses social networks and what do they use it for?
Perhaps some business as a work around poor mans conferencing tool?

Otherwise it seems to me that the users are needy people with a lot of time on their hands – perhaps government workers with desk jobs? Stay at home wives ro husbands or the indigent who have internet access.

or of course teenagers – Wait a minute! I think that says it all right there – Social networks are used by teenagers and older people who still behave like teenagers whenever they can!

People who need to communicate in an effective, safe and efficient way will opt for email unless something better comes along.
Of course we must realize that email is the new phone messaging tool for people who are too busy actually earning a living to be on the phone or answering messaging all day.

So if a better messaging tool comes along it might replace email – social media isn’t it!

IMHO

I think both will evolve a bit and combine or blend into one glob, like a homepage with multiple features. Texting and short emails are about the same thing.
If email providers could control spam, (gmail come up with a way) I think email would easily continue to prosper.

There’s a flaw in reasoning here. The idea of social media replacing email or the reverse thinking, that email isn’t going away represent extremes. If the web has taught us anything, it’s that technology and how we interact with it is in flux. Both email and social media are morphing, and and they will continue to transform. Will one outlive the other? Not sure…no one can be. But we can be sure that technologies will augment and expand the uses of all the social media and email and text. We might end up with a combined model. Loraine Antrim

email will always exist, it’s THE most basic communication channel on internet for ever, whether is web1.0 or 2.0 or 3.0 whatever. And like any product in the market it will keep evolving, companies will keep coming up with new features and people will keep flocking to them. In internet also I guess we have generations, the first generations took up hotmail (so someone using hotmail account mostly tells you that he would be 30, 35+), then someone came up with names which people can relate with professionally, like doctor.com, journalist com. Post Gmail massacre Yahoo now has ymail. Its pretty interesting to look back at email history.

Finally! Yes, email is not dead. There are still plenty of applications to email marketing. We all use email, without one we couldn’t use social media. Just because social media is the newest rave, doesn’t mean it’s time to boot out the old. They both exist and are both effective. Here’s a good compliment to this article: http://www.onlinemarketingconnect.com/nomanisaniland/2009/10/current-and-future-use-of-email-info-sources/comment-page-1/#comment-2

I agree with this. Email is still popular. I asked my friends if they open facebook or their email first and they said email. It’s just that the email is more formal compared to the social media thing.

Um, hello? You missed the one HUGE reason social media will never replace email: sending files! You can’t even use Facebook or myspace to send files to people, and even if you could, it wouldn’t be a very efficient way to do so.