Not long ago, email was the undisputed king of business communication. It provided the best way to share documents, solicit the feedback of colleagues and engage with customers. But email's solitary reign is fast eroding.
Which is not to say that email is dying - if Darwin were alive and well in Silicon Valley, he might suggest that email is evolving, and supporting evidence is rampant. Last week, Google gave Gmail a social networking makeover with Buzz, less than a year after unveiling Wave as its answer to the question, "What would email look like if we set out to invent it today?" And while Google focuses on reinventing email, other innovative companies are developing applications to fulfill functions previously under email's exclusive domain.
No longer the default catch-all for business correspondence and file sharing, email now has competition from a range of social networking and collaboration platforms - tools that are often brought into the office by web-savvy workers, with or without the endorsement of their IT departments. And as the Wall Street Journal's Jessica Vascellaro pointed out in The End of the Email Era, "this shift promises to profoundly rewrite the way we communicate." The question is, how?
We've seen this transition play out in customer relations. With the explosion of the blogosphere, companies gained access to what their customers were saying about them, but not necessarily to them. Forums and wikis sprang up, giving customers additional platforms for uncensored conversations around products and services. The advent of Twitter elevated all this chatter to a dull roar, making it clear that customers are far more likely to express opinions in 140-character tweets than by emailing customer service directly. Of course, platforms like Twitter can serve as a soap box for angry customers, but they also provide a channel for companies to turn disgruntled users into their biggest evangelists, bringing them more closely into the fold of the company. "With the rise of social media, companies have inevitably lost some control of their message," explains Wendy Lea, CEO of Get Satisfaction, "but in exchange, they've received the opportunity to engage their customers in new and powerful ways."
We've witnessed how open platforms have transformed external communications by leveling the playing field between company and customer, but what about internal? In an email-centric paradigm, workplace correspondence is deliberate, often formal in tone, and with a clearly defined audience. But collaborative tools disrupt this closed approach to communication by increasing transparency and expanding our audience without title-based discrimination. A question posed over Yammer reaches your entire company network. Searching for an expertise on Jive identifies all relevant colleagues, not just the one sitting closest to you. And a file slated for review on Box.net is available not only to the person it's been assigned to via tasks, but also shows up in the real-time updates field for relevant collaborators, allowing them to read and respond to comments and keeping everyone in the loop.
Platforms like these are immensely powerful tools for knowledge workers already accustomed to weighing in on friends' Facebook statuses and tweeting to an audience of followers they may or may not know. Not surprisingly, IT departments are being asked to move beyond cumbersome, restrictive software in favor of user-friendly, web-based business applications that place a premium on dialogue and favor ideas based on merit from a broader group. These new tools are breaking down hierarchies and driving the democratization of the workplace, with web-savvy individuals both at the top and in the trenches proactively seeking out and contributing to relevant conversations occurring within their company. They're bringing bright ideas to key documents, and playing an active role as these documents progress from draft to completion. And they're doing all this without needing to be cc'ed on an email or having access to the boardroom.
This new paradigm is very exciting, but it is also disruptive. When we open the conversation to new voices and embrace flexible workflows over rigid ones, we lose some of the structure many workers have become accustomed to. And we have to trust that employees will be smart about when they chime in with valuable contributions, and when they stay on the sidelines. Every form of communication has its pitfalls - we've all accidentally hit "reply all" when we clearly meant otherwise - and fluency in a new form takes practice.
Email isn't disappearing any time soon. It will continue to serve as an important channel of communication, and business applications will still feed into email when appropriate. But don't be surprised if today's knowledge workers are spending less time on email and more time on other platforms - going to Yammer when they want to share a company blog post, or their Box updates page to see what other members of their team are working on. And don't be shocked if new and exciting voices emerge in your organization, voices that were previously left off of email chains.