Email Remains a Top Mobile Activity

While just over a quarter (28 percent) of non-smartphone users said they check their email "constantly" throughout the day, nearly half (45 percent) of smartphone users do so, according to ExactTarget.

In fact, checking email is a more common mobile web activity than visiting Facebook (23 percent) or Twitter (five percent) among smartphone users.

Overall, the home PC remains the top location from which consumers constantly check email (24 percent) with 63 percent using it to check email daily. Meanwhile, 16 percent of email users overall constantly check email from a work or school computer (22 percent daily).

Eleven percent of email users check constantly from a mobile phone (15 percent daily) but the numbers are minimal for iPad/tablet users with two percent constantly checking and three percent checking daily.

The Audience Has Spoken - Social Media Marketing Stats and Research

Business Use of Email, Desk Phones Dropping

Business use of email and desktop phones seems to be declining, a new survey suggests. Only 35 percent of workers expect to use email more in the future compared to last year, while  use of office landline phones is also likely to decline by about eight percent, a new study by GigaOm Pro suggests. 


The survey also suggests that alternative workplace forms of communication, including texting, mobile phones, social networks, video communications and instant messaging are growing. 

Those are a few of the important conclusions one might draw from a recent online study of 1,000 technology-empowered workers in the United States,  exploring the rise of new communication tools in the workplace, conducted by GigaOm, and sponsored by Skype. 

See more here: study. 

Messaging Tops Smart Phone Usage

A recent three-week study of how 150 smart phone owners use their devices shows that the users spend an average of just over 94 minutes a day using their phones, and more than a third of that time, or as much as 28 minutes, is spent reading, writing and responding to email.

The aggregated time spent on all downloaded add-on apps, including Facebook, WordswithFriends and Pandora, is the second largest, totaling just under 11 minutes. Voice calls represent 13 minutes a day worth of usage.

Yankee Group Research Report

Is the Era of Webmail Over?

Globally, total minutes spent on web-based email (not including PC web applications such as Outlook) was down two percent in November 2010 compared to November 2009, with time spent in the Asia-Pacific region showing even more dramatic decline dropping 10 percent, according to comScore.

Within the region, markets showed varying levels of engagement trends. The largest decline in time spent was seen in Malaysia (down 22 percent), India (down 19 percent) and South Korea (down 15 percent). Taiwan, Hong Kong and New Zealand on the other hand actually showed increases in overall minutes spent in the category.

Is the Era of Webmail Over? (comScore Voices)

SMS and Email Marketing: Complementary Rather than Substitutes

There is some truth to the notion that text messaging campaigns are substitutes for email campaigns. There also is some truth to the notion that they are complementary.

The "personal" nature of text messaging and the high need for user opt in are key reasons why the channels mostly appeal to different types of retailer relationships. Text messages require some sort of pre-existing relationship. Perhaps email messages are supposed to require opt in as well, but frequently permission is more tacit than formally acknowledged.

A user that has opted in to receive SMS messages presumably already has significant interest in a particular product or retailer. Email messages can cover a wider range of consumers.

Teen E-Mail Use Drops

In the last year, time spent using e-mail sites like Yahoo and Hotmail has fallen 48 percent among 12- to 17-year-olds, according to comScore, at least time spent with e-mail on computers. That might not come as a surprise. Virtually all studies have shown similar results.

ComScore also found a decline of 10 percent in time spent on Web-based email among 18- to 24-year-olds, about the same as it found for people up to the age of 54.

E-Mail's Big Demographic Split - NYTimes

Google To Offer Threaded, Non-Threaded Email Formats

Google is planning to offer a standard email option in Gmail in the next few months, Henry Blodget reports. Currently, Gmail presents email in a threaded format, in which replies and follow-on emails with the same subject line are grouped together. That's helpful to people who want to follow a single conversation as it develops, or refer back to earlier messages.

Others will find it less useful since the threading feature means new replies do not automatically appear at the top of the inbox, and that's where people are trained to look for new messages.

Apparently Google will simply offer a way to select the "threaded" or non-threaded" formats.

Google To Change Gmail, Add "Normal Email" Option Instead Of Just "Conversations"

Is Email Going Away?

Lots of people, including Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg, think email is fading away as a communiation activity. "Only 11 percent of teens email each day," Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg says. "Email is probably going away."

Part of that behavior pattern can be explained by the fact that teens are not in the work world in the same way as older users are, and email remains highly important in the work world.

This is good news for Facebook and online advertising in general, she argues.
People are more comfortable seeing ads directed at them in their Facebook "News Feed" than they are in their email inboxes, she argues.

While ads in an inbox are called "spam," Facebook users will even sometimes click "Like" on a brand's Facebook page and volunteer to receive messages directly from advertisers.

link

Social Networking Changing Collaboration at Work

Social networking is starting to change the nature of worker collaboration within companies, new poll conducted by Harris Research suggests. Of workers who use social networking at work, 59 percent say that their usage of social networking has increased over the past year. But only about 17 percent of the 1,000 workers surveyed report using social networking.

The study found the most frequently used application for collaborating with others is email (91 percent), but that what people want from their email is changing. In addition to email, the Harris poll found that other applications being used by respondents to collaborate with others in the workplace include shared spaces (66 percent), voice calls and teleconferencing (66 percent), web conferencing (55 percent), video conferencing (35 percent), instant messaging (34 percent), and social networking (17 percent).

Respondents like the fact that email provides an easily-accessible record of communication and the ability to communicate with many people at once. Users also rank email prominently among various collaboration tools because there is a high level of comfort in using the application to easily communicate with others inside and outside their organizations. However, the poll showed there are many pain points associated with the way most email solutions function today.

While email remains the preferred method of collaboration, many respondents complained they receive too much irrelevant email (40 percent) and that they lack the ability to collaborate in real time (32 percent). End users also dislike the fact that they have very limited storage (25 percent) and that large volumes of email come into their inbox with no organizational structure (21 percent).

Half of those using social networking for work by-pass company restrictions to do so. The study participants who prefer to use social networks indicated they would like to have control over who sees their content as well as be able to share with groups of users using different tools. The respondents also indicated the desire to collaborate in real time without having to open up an additional application.

Text Rules, Even for Older Users

A survey by Tekelec shows that text messaging, once seen as the main communications tool for teenagers and young adults, has become prevalent among older generations. The 500-person survey shows that 60 percent of users older than 45 are just as likely to use SMS as they were to make voice calls from their mobile.

That's perhaps not good news for voice usage but shows the value of text messaging plans. About 40 percent of female users say they "mainly text," rather than talk. About 30 percent of male respondents reported they are likely to text rather than call.

Text messaging also is catching up to e-mail as the preferred means of daily international communication, with 32 percent of responses across all ages preferring SMS, compared to 33 percent who prefer to use email.

So is the fact that text messaging is displacing some amount of voice a good thing for mobile service providers? Not entirely. More than 80 percent of mobile service provider revenue still is derived directly from voice, says Alan Pascoe, Tekelec senior manager.

"Of the remaining data piece, SMS has the largest chunk of revenue and the highest profitability," he says.  "Texting is particularly appealing for operators because nearly every subscriber can do it and networks have sufficient signaling bandwidth."

"Still, profitability isn’t quite keeping up with usage, thanks to all-you-can-eat plans, but operators can reduce costs with a more efficient SMS network infrastructure," Pascoe says.

Pascoe says Tekelec is not sure how much email volume is being displaced by texting. But as a general rule younger users are more comfortable with texting than older users and businesses still prefer email.

"A key reason is that an SMS message implies an urgent request, whereas email is typically less urgent," he says. "Personal communication often revolves around an immediate need, like making plans, so texting is the more natural approach outside of the office."

But email is also more conducive for business tasks like sending attachments, he adds.

So will text messaging ultimately be as "archivable" as email? Certainly operators are looking at a number of ways to "add value and stickiness to SMS offerings, including archiving," Pascoe says.

"The most common ideas we hear discussed are email-like functionalities: archiving, copying, forwarding, black and white lists and group distribution," says Pascoe. "The wild card for text message archiving demand is Google Voice, which allows subscribers to store SMS in Gmail instead of on their phones, keeping messages indefinitely."

"With Google providing this for free, it may be difficult for operators to generate revenue from it," Pascoe notes.

Person-to-person messages are the foundation of SMS, and will dominate for the foreseeable future, he thinks. "But the model is evolving so that growth is strongest for person-to-application, application-to-person and machine-to-machine communications."

40% Will Increase Email, Text Message Marketing Campaigns, Survey Finds

About 40 percent of email marketers surveyed in November 2009 by Silverpop say they will increase their email marketing budgets in 2010, while 47 percent said their budgets would stay the same.

In the coming year, more than half of survey respondents (52 percent) said increasing customer loyalty was a top email marketing goal.

But incremental revenue clearly is the top driver. Overall, 51 percent of respondents want to drive incremental revenue with their email program, while 65 percent of those with larger email budgets say that's their top goal in 2010.

"Inbox clutter" remains an issue for 37percent of respondents. That's an issue, but nothing like the opt in issues faced by users of text messaging campaigns, whose users often must pay "by the message" to receive them. Cluttering up an inbox is one thing, charging someone to receive your marketing message is far worse.

And social media is growing in important. About 84 percent or marketers plan to include social media into their email programs in the coming year, while 38 percent will add text messaging.

Marketers enjoying budget increases are even more likely to add these to their programs; About 89 percent of marketers will growing budgets say they will incorporate social media,  while 44 percent of respondents with growing budgets say they will add text message campaigns.

Email linked to popular social networks will work fine for PC-based users, but text messaging will be needed to reach mobile users on the go.

97% of Business Communications Now is Email

As much as 97 percent of all business communications now occurs using email, says Bakbone. And though some executives would not place much credence on the financial impact of email outages, which some estimate can cost a 500-person enterprise about $1.5 million in lost productivity, the cost of paying employees who cannot use basic business communications such as email has been calculated by multiplying the total hours of downtime per year by $18,000 per hour.

For an enterprise of any size, that cost can range from “up to $100,000” to “up to $500,000,” Bakbone says. Then there is the cost of information technology resources that must be consumed to get email systems back in operation.

Whether one considers such soft costs significant or not, the typical email outage lasts 69 minutes, and annual email outages can total 32.1 hours a year, Bakbone says.

http://www.itbusinessedge.com/offer.aspx?o=03830006em0420

Social Networking Overtakes Email

Internet activity patterns are changing, according to Nielsen Online. In the past, email has been the "killer app" for Internet users. More recently, search replaced email.

These days, email has been eclipsed by search and social networking.

Two thirds of the world’s Internet population visit a social network or blogging site and the sector now accounts for almost 10 percent of all Internet activity time. "Member communities" have overtaken personal email to become the world’s fourth most popular online acivity after search, portals and PC software applications, Nielsen says.

The total amount spent online globally increased by 18 percent between December 2007 and December 2008. In the same period, however, the amount of time spent on member community sites rose by 63 percent to 45 billion minutes,  and on Facebook by a massive 566 percent, says Nielsen, growing from 3.1 billion minutes to 20.5 billion minutes.

"The staggering increase in the amount of time people are spending on these sites is changing the way people spend their time online and has ramifications for how people behave, share and interact within their normal daily lives," says Nielsen.

Consumer engagement within social networks has the potential to change the way consumers are targeted, not just through the digital medium, but through all forms of traditional media, Nielsen adds.

According to Nielsen Online, more people in the United States, Australia, Brazil, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Switzerland and the United Kingdom are using social networks and blogs than email. Where 85.9 percent of respondents say they use search, 65.1 percent say they use email.

In addition, time spent on social networks and blogging sites is growing at over three times the rate of overall Internet growth.

http://www.nielsen-online.com/pr/pr_090309.pdf

Ubiquitous Online Communications

If you needed any reminding, email and instant messaging now is quite widespread in North America, Japan and Europe, as broadband penetration also has become a typical experience. Use of social networking sites still has a ways to go, except in Canada, where usage seems unusually high.

Teens IM; Adults Send Email

About 25 percent of surveyed respondents send IMs from their cell phones, including one in three (32 percent) teens, according to the second annual AP-AOL Instant Messaging Trends Survey.

Keyboards make a difference, it seems. So do social networking services and the IM providers themselves, all of which now support IM-over-mobile capabilities. All of the major instant messaging services also let users have their instant messages forwarded directly to their cell phones when they're on-the-go. In addition, IM users are instant messaging from within their social networking profiles.

Workplace use also is becoming commonplace. More than one in four (27 percent) users say they use instant messaging at work. Further, half of at-work IM users say that instant messaging makes them more productive at work, a 25 percent increase over last year.

More than half (55 percent) of teen IM users have used instant messaging to get help with their homework. This is a 17 percent increase over last year. Meanwhile, 22 percent of teens say they have sent an IM to ask for or accept a date.

Forty-three percent of teen IM users say they have used instant messaging to say something they would not say to someone in person. Teenage girls are more likely than boys to do so. Nearly half of teenage girls surveyed have used instant messaging to say something they would not say in person, compared with just over a third of teenage boys.

Teens today are more likely to upload photos (42 percent in 2007 vs. 34 percent in 2006) while instant messaging. They are less likely to conduct online research for school (57 percent vs. 63 percent) or update their blog or social profile (33 percent vs. 42 percent) while sending IMs.

Nearly three in four teens (70 percent) and one in four adults (24 percent) send more instant messages than emails.

IM users tend to engage in multiple online activities while sending instant messages. Checking email is the most popular activity among eight in ten adult and teen IM users. After email, adult IM users most often conduct online searches (49 percent), while teens say they like to research homework assignments online (57 percent).

Nearly four in five (79 percent) at-work IM users say they have used instant messaging in the office to take care of personal matters. One in five (19 percent) IM users say they send more instant messages than emails to their co-workers and colleagues.

Email Communication Declining in U.K. Market

Most people would guess that teenagers send more instant or text messages than emails. In the U.K., says ComScore, it is a quantifiable trend. As it turns out, people now are communicating more from within the context of their social networks than using portal-based email. That isn't yet true for business communications, of course.

But it stands to reason that personal use of email is for communication with friends and family. And if those people are part of a social network, one doesn't have to go outside the network to send messages. Some day soon, people will launch and receive voice, video and other communications from within the social network as well.

Web 2.0 Corollary: Email as Content Context

With IBM Launching Sametime and Microsoft getting ready for its OCS launch, we might note a corollary to the trend that has communications being embedded within the context of applications and content. One trend has communications (voice, video or audio conferencing, text messaging, instant messaging, email) being embedded within enterprise applications or portals.

At the same time, stand-alone communications tools such as email are morphing as well. Where today email is a stand-alone communications tool on the desktop, it seems to be pushing in a new direction. It seems to be becoming a tool to coordinate communications or content from RSS feeds, blogs, wikis, IMs, and voice.

Instead of using a document attachment, email might simply point a user to a link that displays a page, a document, a news feed, a site or client where a piece of information or content resides, rather than leading a user away from the message.

Zimbra, for example, pops up other information that embedded in a message. Zimbra retrieves the information and pulls it into the email, instead of opening a link that takes the user someplace else.

So it might not make sense, someday, to separate out a user's "communication" activities from a user's "information" or "content" activities. One will communicate when using or accessing information or content, and use or retrieve information or content from a "communications" application.

New Yahoo! Mail Launches

Yahoo! Mail has launched in the U.S. market. The updated former email client expands the Web mail service into a "social communication" tool, adding the ability to send text messages to cellphones directly from e-mail. The latest update also illustrates a trend: "communication" and "content" apps are blurring and blending. At the same time, communications are shifting, in part, into the context of social networking sites, where communications is a "background" feature always available, and where the current willingness and ability to communicate is known to each social network "buddy."

Yahoo! also has tweaked the interface to make it easier for people to go back and forth between email, instant messaging and text messaging, and to access content from inside the client itself.

The new service includes two real-time communication features that are the first of their kind from a leading Web mail service. These include the ability to send free text messages from Yahoo! Mail to mobile phone numbers in the US, Canada, India, and the Philippines, and the ability to send instant messages (IM) from Yahoo! Mail to members of the world's largest combined IM community, including users of Yahoo! Messenger and Windows Live Messenger2.

The new Yahoo! Mail enables people to select how they want to communicate with their online contacts: by e-mail, instant message or text message to a mobile phone number.

U.S. users now can right click on underlined dates, names and keywords within messages and take additional action, such as adding events directly to their Yahoo! Calendars, adding friends to their Contacts, immediately viewing a Yahoo! Map of an address or performing a Web search on a keyword.

Yahoo! says the client will operate with the speed and responsiveness of a desktop application. A co-branded version of the new Yahoo! Mail will also be available in the fall to customers using the following broadband Internet services: AT&T Yahoo! High Speed Internet, Verizon Yahoo! and Rogers Yahoo! Hi-Speed Internet. The new Yahoo! Mail will be available this fall to Yahoo! Small Business Mail users as well.

Linked In is Like Email; Facebook is Like IM

I've never been a fan of LinkedIn (I'm not a "head hunter," and it undoubtedly is a useful tool for people who do that for a living). It might be a nice utility for updating contact information for a small subset of the people you actually know and communicate with. Beyond that I've never had occasion to use it.

Facebook seems like a better version of LinkedIn, though. I was able to get my son's new address when he went back to NYU without using LinkedIn. To be sure, the information wasn't pushed to me. I had to go view his Facebook page. But I got what I needed without emailing or calling.

So why is LinkedIn like email? It's a tool "older" people use for work. Why is Facebook like IM? It's a tool "younger" people (and increasing numbers of "not so young") use to keep up with other people they actually care about. In some important ways, IM also is a "richer" experience, as Facebook is.

Free Version of CommuniGate Pronto! Now Available

CommuniGate Systems has two new initiatives for free IP-based communications addressing consumers, SOHO and very small business uers. CommuniGate Systems is offering free versions of its Flash-based client Pronto! and the CommuniGate Pro Internet Communications platform.

CommuniGate’s new portal, www.TalktoIP.com, gives consumers a free live account of Pronto!, a flash based user interface that integrates e-mail, calendaring and secure IM in a single dashboard. Users can create their individual accounts @TalktoIP.com in just a few simple steps.

In addition, the CommuniGate Pro Community Edition is available for a complimentary download giving up to five users free full-service accounts installable on any computer or server inside their home or small business.

The product is compatible with any operating system—Windows XP, Windows Server Edition, Apple OSX, and Linux. The Community Edition allows small businesses and home users to enjoy the power of a carrier-grade technology through a simple and easy-to-manage package for e-mail, IM, and VoIP technologies for free, the company says.

I asked about Vista support and haven't heard back, yet. I suspect Vista support is not yet available, so though I would love to try it out, I will have to wait.

The Community Edition provides email, groupware, VoIP, IM(SIP/Simple & XMPP), a virtual PBX with free CG/PL application source code, conferencing server, voice mail and mobility support, the company says.

CommuniGate Pro Community Edition can be downloaded at www.communigate.com, or for the online live version visit www.talktoip.com to get a free account.