I’m what you’d call a moderate reader of Laughing Squid. It comes in my RSS feed, and I’d say about 30-40% of the articles interest me. That’s actually fairly good, as I tend to blow through news items only looking for the tasty morsels of goodness.
But I must take exception with a recent post entitled Social Network Message Autoresponder.
I get the complaint. I really and truly do. We have this fantastic communication tool called email, so why don’t we just get folks to use it more often? Well… three reasons:
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One size does not necessarily fit all – Email may be your chosen way to communicate, but it’s obviously not the preferred method for the person who reached out to you via some social site. And unless I’m mistaken, the only way they can contact you through said social media site is if you already have a profile on said social graph, yes? This look like a cake-eat situation.
My grandma makes the same argument for paper letters – This works really well for my grandma, but not so much for me. The same in reverse holds true for my son. If I email him, it takes him days to respond. But if I send him a message on MyFace, he responds in minutes. This one relates to #1 above, but I felt it was strong enough to stand on it’s own.
Email is overloaded – While it may still be hailed as the killer app, it’s losing its charm for many of us. I dread opening the inbox some times, and I even keep the damn thing cleaned out! Thank the gods for RSS feeds and readers, or I’d be out of my gourd. And if there was a way to route email to an RSS feed, I’d be in hog heaven!
As I stated earlier, I sympathize. Heck, I was in your camp for a while. But since every single social media site I belong can be set to send me an email when someone messages me, and since my browser tends to store my login details, and since the person decided that’s how they communicate best, I’m happy to take off the mask an talk to them over there. On my schedule, of course.
Do you try and force the conversation on your terms? Or are you happy to talk where they want to talk? Tell me about it…
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