Cc: How Social Media Killed Email

Don’t get me wrong. Email is still used, and if you ask anybody trying to sell you an email marketing campaign, it is the best thing ever and just getting better. If you believe that, I have a newspaper to sell you.

Let’s face it, if email was a movie character, it would look like the zombies in Night of the Living Dead. Just like the spammers who messed it up for the rest of us. Fortunately for many of us, we are smarter. We figured out social media. We know Facebook, and Twitter, and RSS. We don’t need your stinkin’ email.

How did this happen? Consider the last time you trusted your cousin Cindy with your email address. Did you ever? I mean, a person can only sort through so many CC:’d political jokes and inspirational poems before their head explodes. I thought “Cc:” was for when you were sending something to a very small group of concerned parties, while “Bcc:” was for sending out to that horde of folks who may or may not have updated their virus protection.

On top of that, actually because of that, you have every con artist in Nigeria begging to wire the $50,000,000 USD that their dead uncle, the Czar of Cantspellworthistan, has tied up in some kind of mysterious probate. Why the heck did the Czar of Cantspellworthistan have US dollars, anyway?

What’s worse is that all of the sudden you have all of cousin Cindy’s pals emailing back and forth. You have seen this, right? The squillion people emailing their LOLs and goofy replies to the whole group of people. Then as soon as just one of those twits gets a virus KABOOM! Your inbox splits at the seams.

This description took a lot of health points away from email the way a shot in the chest does on Halo 3, but since it was still an easy option for reaching everybody from A to Z, it still had a pulse. The sniper rifle shot to the head that finally put email in a body bag came much later.

This is Cousin Cindy. She was so much sweeter back then!

Spam filtering got a little better, and in 2003 some brilliant people enacted The CAN-SPAM Act of 2003. It was kind of a joke to most spammers, and in 2004 less than one percent of spam was in compliance with the law. Of course, when the people managing your email servers figured out that there was no way all of the email about Viagra was legitimate, you could actually catch back up with Cindy and her pals’ email, but you had to filter diligently.

On April first 2004, Google’s Gmail came along with some CPR and breathed life back to into email. April first is April Fools’ Day, which is fitting. Email was still looking pretty old and wrinkled, with one foot on a banana peel and the other hanging over a cliff.

In comes MySpace and Facebook like princes on white steeds. The things you had tried so hard to keep up with from Cindy started getting through. If you didn’t read the message, she could just post it to the wall and you could see it whenever you were good and ready.

OK, the wall thing can kind of stink, but that is another post, for another day. Damn you Farmville!

Something nice about the email from social networks is that people are not actually seeing your email and do not have access to harvest it like a 27 year old mullet head in a Camaro at the high school. Plus, I can choose to ignore cousin Cindy’s annoying friend Patty’s friend request.

Since so few people actually have the attention span of a toothpick these days, in comes Twitter to brighten our communications world. Twitter is great. Just tell me what you have to say, but don’t bug me with the story about grandma’s sick cat getting into the trash again with 4,000 words, OK? Think about it a moment first and find a way to cram it down to 140 characters. This works for about 90 percent of the email I used to get. Seriously, I love Twitter. I love it so much I wrote a book about it. I actually sold 14 copies (mostly to mom and her gracious friends). The point about every Twitter user being an expert about Twitter … yeah, another post, another day.

So we all love Twitter, right? Then we have Google trying to jump on board, first with Google Wave and most recently with Google Buzz. It is fine, but I guess I didn’t drink enough Gmail Kool Aid. I still think their efforts are better spent frustrating the less talented SEOs.

All in all, perhaps the greatest killer of email in the social media killing tool set is the RSS feed. It is still a bit confusing to some people like cousin Cindy, but if you just get to know RSS and become close with your reader, (I use Google Reader) you will love it. Before you know it, the “cousin Cindy’s” of the world may pick up on the fact that you can find some pretty darn cool inspirational poems and cute kitty cat pictures without her help. Delivered to your feed reader, even! No spam. Just the stuff you asked for.

Here, just try it for yourself and subscribe to Mobile Local Social so we never get lost in the email.

By the way, if you just cannot stand not knowing my email address, it is thebigcheese@veryimportantguy.com. Ever since I responded to that cheap Rolex offer Cindy sent me, I cannot seem to use it anyway.