Many of you are old enough to remember those old Reese's Peanut Butter Cup commercials? (For anyone too young, Dan O'Leary, link to Youtube below.) That's what I was reminded of when I looked at my Gmail inbox last night.
As all of you on Twitter have noticed, you now receive an email anytime someone retweets or mentions you. I have columns set up for these things, right? Do I need this extra alert? Do you? Am I just cranky? I'm glad that these alerts can be turned off in Twitter (does anyone use Twitter as their Tweeting interface?), but to me it's the Department of Redundant Redundancy Department.
Getting an email alert of a retweet while I'm in Hootsuite reading up on all my tweeple is a wee bit bizarre. Like living in this: 
On the other hand, it semi-confirms my sneaking suspicion that, contrary to many social media pundits' claims, the reports of the death of email have been greatly exaggerated. I know that email sends me to Facebook (don't ask me why an email from Facebook is OK, but one from Twitter bugs me -- I'm good with my own hypocracy). I know that Connect at AIIM, the every-other-week newsletter that I send out, is as well-read as the Infonomics Weekly I started sending 3 years ago, before the sonic boom of social media. Also, with a still substantial percentage of companies blocking access to social media sites when employees are at work, email remains a key, if not the key, way for business to business and professional communications to reach people.
When these sorts of proclamations about the NEXT NEW GREAT THING doing away with the old boring thing, I always think of the capture industry. Scanning technologies, forms processing, document imaging, etc. work and have worked for 3-ish decades. If you want to automate your business processes and eliminate paper, you can. However, despite success and rapidly decreasing complexity (at least for smaller rollouts, a properly implemented capture solution is HARD -- you have to worry about things like paper dust in high-volume implementations. Really. Paper dust.), these tools have still woefully underpenetrated the business world. When I see declarations of the death of email, I just keep thinking that all the micro-blogging/instant messaging/whatever tools in the world are not going to unseat an established communication tool that everyone knows how to use next year.
Anyway.
Will it change; will email slowly wither on the vine? Absolutely. Dead yet? Not so much, Polly could still muscle up to those bars and go, "VOOM."
As I was finishing this, I noticed that Vinicius da Costa posted Social Media's Secret Weapon: Email, with some good thoughts, a link to another interesting post, and a fabulous picture of a secret weapon: http://gotsocial.blogspot.com/2011/05/social-media-secret-weapon-email.html?spref=tw
And, for Dan, here's that commercial:
#twitter #enterprise2.0 #E-mail #SocialBusiness #Collaboration #tweets