Email still `king’, survey says

Social media is, of course, now all the rage, with services such as Facebook and Twitter seen as key to understanding market trends and instant messaging as the new driver of business communication. The question then has to be asked: just how much of that is proactive media hype by the proponents of such technologies?

The question arises because a recent survey conducted by V1, a vendor of business automation and document management systems. It is, to be fair, a survey only of finance industry professionals, where having a cast iron audit of everything and anything that goes to make up a business decision is vital, but it shows that 88 percent of finance professionals still see e-mail as the best form of business communication, despite that rise in the perception of social media.

The survey asked respondents to classify themselves by their generation as either baby boomers (born in the 1940s and 50s), Generation X (born in the 60s and 70s) or Generation Y (80s and 90s). Findings revealed some notable similarities in attitudes and trends to digital communications between the age groups.

All generations selected e-mail as the preferred choice for receiving information, with each scoring social media channels such as Twitter and Facebook as being of low importance. All three age groups rated Facebook and Twitter as their two least preferred methods of business communication.

The older employees rated Twitter as the least important, with 56 percent giving the social media platform the lowest score possible, and 55 percent scoring likewise for Facebook. Generation Y also ranked Facebook as their least popular channel, with 53 percent giving it a low score.

The youngest employees were also most likely to give paper a low rating, at 42 percent, followed by Generation X with 33 percent and baby boomers at 31 percent.

“While the e-mail is the clear choice for most finance professionals in terms of how they receive information, preferences are less clear cut when it comes to other forms of communication,” said Catherine Murphy, Head of Marketing at V1.

“Perhaps most revealing is attitudes towards social media – it seems across the generations many employees still have a reluctance to receiving information via social media channels. Not surprisingly, the research sample confirms that paper is in decline. Just 20 years ago it was an office essential, yet in less than two decades it has been overtaken by email.”

The research also revealed a number of other IT trends differentiating the generations. For instance, baby boomers spend an average of 90 minutes online for business purposes, with an additional 57 minutes a day for social use. For Generation X, the figures were 140 minutes for business, and 55 for social; while Generation Y spend 167 minutes a day online for business purposes, and 107 minutes for non-business.

The middle-aged group were most likely, at 56 percent, to have a LinkedIn account, suggesting they may see networking as more important than any other generation. Younger workers were the least likely to use LinkedIn, at 42 percent, with boomers in the middle, at 47 percent.

Generation Y, at 56 percent, were the biggest users of Facebook, followed by Generation X at 39 percent. Baby boomers, at 28 percent, were least likely to use it.

Overall, Twitter was the least popular of the social media platforms, with Generation X having the highest number of users at 28 percent, Generation Y second at 22 percent, and boomers using it the least, with just 19 percent of them.

“The research clearly points to younger workers using the Internet most, which suggests that the office of the future will become increasingly reliant on technology as Generation Y workers mature into the decision makers of tomorrow,” Murphy added. “As technology moves forward, driven by the mobile boom and the likes of 4G, businesses’ growing reliance on IT and digital media is likely to increase rapidly in the years ahead.

“The results show that younger generations are the biggest technology users, and we expect this trend to continue.”

But the undercurrent of this would seem to be that, when it comes to business transactions and important decision-making, digital media will need to add a strong audit trail component for social media-based services if they are to replace email. This is particularly the case as email is beginning to be re-purposed as the base line component of much broader document and communications management systems.