The chain email you just received from your Grandmother will not go away anytime soon, unless she gets on Facebook.
Since the dawn of email came the dawn of chain emails. Helpful chain emails debunk myths, share myths, pictures, stories, jokes, political rants, nasty gossip and more. However, the dawn of Facebook changes all that.
Instead of long emails forwarded so many times you have scroll to page 5 for the actual content, we have quick-hitting, truncated bursts of information. “Become a fan” takes care of just about anything fit for chain email.
Do you want to protest the amount of special sauce on a Big Mac? No problem. Start a group of People Against Big Mac Sauce, start sharing and build a fan base.
Mashable’s Adam Ostrow shared the results of an AddToAny analysis of its own data. Disclosure: The company presumably has some interest in shared content via social media. They’ve made it their business. Still the results are easy to believe when taken at face value. AddToAny’s database should be the topic of another email. Owning that data, seeing those trends sounds like a gold mine to me.
Facebook leads all comers with 24% of the “shared” content on the web. Harnessing that word-of-mouth opportunity could obviously be a coup for mainstream and guerilla marketers alike.
Email and Twitter finish ten points down, but the three account for just under half of all shared content on the web. The long-tail includes Yahoo that beats MySpace that beats MSN that beats Delicious that beats Digg that surprisingly beats Google. Well, it surprised me.
Lolly’s Blog Till You Drop! blog claims work-related emails account for 99% of her inbox. Though I still see a fair number of FW: FW: RE: FW: RE: FW: Funny Pictures From Redneck Picnic-type chain emails, I will admit a decline.
A while back our client needed a little design work for a new web app called Start-a-Fire. Check it out here. The chain email found a new home in this app and it’s easy to see a demographic easily engaged by this online social media tool.
In the end, email itself appears to be losing ground. Reply to social media via SMS. Tweets post to facebook. Tasks set by me or co-workers arrive as text messages. Sharing skips right past inboxes to phones. If there was/is value in chain email, it’s lost on me.
Is email on the way out the door? It’s not hard to imagine.
Glad I inspired you!
Emails are here to stay for a little while longer anyway… Companies are increasingly using social media to communicate internally…
Let’s have this chat again in 5 years time..
I will check out your app - sounds interesting
Bonus content. The younger folks might not remember the precursor to chain email, the chain letter. Threats of bad luck are nothing new. There was no better source of pyramid schemes or global pen pals. This was back in the days when you actually looked forward to getting mail. Could the chain letter make a comeback? http://tr.im/uq0b