I recently attended South by South West Interactive in Austin, Texas. I guess it would really fit most people’s definition of a ‘geek-fest’ - loads of start-ups touting their latest ideas and a host of writers and bloggers trying to get a sniff of the next big thing. Twitter really took off after being shown here in 2007, and you could really sense the buzz of people hoping something equally as big would turn up this time.

But the real surprise to me was that, amidst all the talk, nobody was mentioning email marketing. There were a couple of companies at the trade show with products to manage inboxes, but even they were mostly concerned with integrating email marketing with other messaging such as Facebook and Twitter.

The weirdest thing was that nobody seemed to be minding about it either. There were no panel debates predicting the end of email marketing as a communications channel. In fact, it seemed that everyone had already accepted that email was dead and buried - they had all moved on and left it behind.

And it seems not to have been restricted to SXSW either. I’ve seen a number of tweets (Twitter messages for the uninitiated) from the recent MarketingSherpa Email Summit in Florida reporting that although delegates had accepted the need to integrate more messaging media into the marketing mix, nobody much had been flying the flag for email, and arguing why it might still be a valuable way to talk to people.

For obvious reasons, this started me thinking. My first reaction was to look at my own inbox and see what sorts of messages might end up being replaced. Certainly, whilst I was in Texas, I used Twitter a huge amount to keep in touch with what events were happening - where the latest parties were, how long the lines had been, whether the free beer had run out, and so on. I’d appreciated up-to-the-minute information about which panel discussions were going on, and I loved the way a quote from Guy Kawasaki in his keynote - "If I do it, it’s clever marketing, if someone else sends it to me, it’s spam" - pinged out to the world from the conference hall and then came back - quoted by lots of people who hadn’t themselves been there.

When I met new people, I looked them up on LinkedIn to see what they had been up to and if I decided to make contact with them after the conference, I could easily see myself doing that with a message on that site rather than with an email.

But at the same time, much of the administration of my trip had been conducted by email. I still had my flight and hotel receipts in my inbox - and with all the terms and conditions they certainly weren’t going to fit into a 140-character Twitter post. I was still sending documents to my customers back home which I wouldn’t have been posting to their Facebook pages.

And then, of course, I had a major déjà vu moment. I remembered how people had lamented the death of the traditional letter, but had ignored the fact that there’s now much more communication between friends (particularly those on the edge of a social circle) than there ever was before. I remembered how marketers had bemoaned the lack of responsiveness of direct mail - only to leap wholeheartedly into the (then) new world of email marketing.

The truth is that we live in a world where communication methods are evolving all the time. But - and this is the amazing thing that must be occupying the minds of psychology academics all over the world - people have a remarkable ability to grasp the pros and cons of every new medium, and adapt their communications around it. And those of us who communicate for a living simply need to relax, and go with the flow. We have to actively engage in these new techniques and force ourselves to look at how we might use each new channel both for ourselves and for our companies. We can certainly be sure that this process of evolution is not going to stop - and I think we should celebrate the opportunities that it presents.

It’s something I’d like to come back to in future blogs - and it would be great to get your opinions too. Please feel free to discuss your thoughts on this issue in the Comments area below.

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About the Author

Kieran Cooper is the General Manager of Lyris UK. These days his job involves everything from sales and account management to implementation projects and support for the 250 Lyris customers in the UK and Europe.

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