Socialmedialand

I wrote a post cautioning you against ignoring the giants - like email, Facebook, Twitter, etc when choosing tactics for your social strategy. But now I have to caution the major giants from ignoring the David’s of the world.

@Copyblogger sent a tweet out linking to this post about Google’s CEO, Eric Schmidt’s, position on Twitter:

“Speaking as a computer scientist, I view all of these as sort of poor man’s email systems,”

“In other words, they have aspects of an email system, but they don’t have a full offering. To me, the question about companies like Twitter is: Do they fundamentally evolve as sort of a note phenomenon, or do they fundamentally evolve to have storage, revocation, identity, and all the other aspects that traditional email systems have? Or do email systems themselves broaden what they do to take on some of that characteristic?

I think the innovation is great. In Google’s case, we have a very successful instant messaging product, and that’s what most people end up using.

Twitter’s success is wonderful, and I think it shows you that there are many, many new ways to reach and communicate, especially if you are willing to do so publicly.”

It has the ring of “famous last words” if you ask me. To think that Google’s instant message is equal to Twitter is a little over the top in my opinion. They serve very different purposes and really aren’t comparable. Email, also, serves a different purpose than Twitter. Twitter allows you to communicate to a broad network of people, start dialogues with them, join into conversations already in progress and share the wealth of the results of these interactions with the world. When I “reply all” on my email I doubt that has the same type of reach.

I’m not saying email is dead. I’m not saying IM is useless. I’m saying that all three things are separate, individual things that serve different purposes and for Eric Schmidt to categorically dismiss Twitter as something that will either evolve into email/IM or fade away as a novelty is extremely short sighted in my opinion.

Enough about my opinion, what about yours? Leave a comment!

One Response to “Giants Should Still Be Careful”