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There are two interesting facts about the growth of the short messaging system (SMS) that are also shared with e-mail. The first is that success was achieved with minimal spending on advertising. I’m pushed to think of a single advert urging me to SMS a friend. What happened was that supply created its own demand. Once the capacity to deliver messages instantly and cheaply was available, the message spread round the world by "viral" marketing, or word-of-mouth. Viral marketing was unintentionally invented by Netscape over six years ago when it made copies of its browser freely available over the Web, a decision that led to tens of millions being downloaded within months. This lesson has yet to be learned by the so-called dotcom companies selling to the consumer that have crippled themselves with huge marketing costs to establish their new brands. The difference is they are selling old economy goods over the Internet rather than digital products like e-mail that are intrinsic to the Web. However, this problem won’t last much longer: not because dotcoms will have found a solution but because they will have stopped calling themselves dotcoms. They are now reinventing themselves as software engineers or providers of merchandising solutions in order to have any chance of crossing a venture capitalist’s threshold before they are shown the door. Viral marketing is still booming. The second interesting factor is what effect short messaging will have on information overload. Overload has been talked about years but it is only now starting to bite. Static overload has always been a problem in the sense that there has always been too much information in the world to absorb. The information revolution simply brought an age-old problem to the desktop. But "dynamic" overload — the tidal wave of e-mails, now joined now by short messages — is different. It is aimed at your screen and demands a response — often instant — and is now threatening to become counter productive. E-mailing quickly became a tool for competitive advantage because of the way it could cut response times, instantly disseminate information throughout the country, and cut through artificial corporate layers created by geography and bureaucracy. Now it is different. Managers are finding they can’t cope with 100, even 200 e-mails a day: everyone in the company wants to send them a blind copy of what they are doing and outside organisations and individuals can get through to them immediately without going through the secretarial filter. Employees now send e-mails to colleagues sitting next to them rather than speak — so they remain on the record and aren’t the victim of a memory lapse. It has got to the stage where busy executives have stopped opening all their e-mails because they simply can’t. One US businessman admitted to the Wall Street Journal that he had 1,059 unopened "carbon copy" e-mails. Another confessed he had gone back to using the telephone or voice-mail because it was more personal. Communications that aren’t recognisable aren’t even opened. They have become a new kind of junk mail. This is a sea change, because with letters, at least you knew someone was opening them. Some managers now employ more not fewer secretaries to cope with the e-mail overload. Others print them out, hoping to go through them later — a resolution that soon gets broken once a few more hundred emails have arrived. No one has yet found an answer to e-mail overload, except to make sure that you answer every one you open immediately — a resolution that inevitably leads you to open fewer in the first place. What will happen when text messages — now the plaything of the younger generation — seep into corporate culture can only be guessed at? In theory, they are lethally efficient.But they will add yet another layer to corporate overload? The only sure thing is that the communications revolution will end up with less not more communication. |
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