This week, Facebook announced their Social Email Marketing service which will wrap together Text, Chat and Messaging together. On a daily basis, over 4 billion messages both direct and instant messages are sent via Facebook. Their marketing campaign over the last 12 to 18 months that “email is dead” has been brilliant.
In the marketing world, it’s well known that email is a key artery to both our online social networking lives, our mobile lives as well as professional lives. In fact, read All Roads Lead to Email in order to understand more about how email is used as our focal point of our online activities.
Some interesting comments about Facebook’s announcement include that these conversations would be captured online forever. It’s a little bit of a scary thought to capture in black and white all my casual conversations with online friends forever. Also, Facebook has now been capturing and aggregating our conversations with friends online so we can each go and visit these past conversations and see our relationships at work. I found it rather fascinating to see how much many touches happen between those who are closer to me and how some relationships aren’t all that close but the conversation can sometimes be a little on the richer side with each touch.
I laugh at the thought of being able to see my relationships visually with other people in terms of number of touches as well as the depth of each touch that we have with each other. In the long run, I would imagine that I could see how each became closer, deeper and richer or how some might have melted away. All those questions about what ever happened to those close friends from my past, now answered for us in a visual history of conversations, photo sharing and comments.
How fascinating is this brave new world?!