Charlene Li

If you think email is starting to feel outdated, perhaps it's not the tool, but your misuse of the tool. For years, I resorted to email when other forms of communication would have been much more effective. Why? Because everyone has an inbox. It's the most reliable way to reach someone without having to know all their different communication preferences. What our chosen email tool did was help break us out of the email box we were in to see all the different communication streams we could choose from for any given task. 

One of the few upsides to our Great Depression-like dip in the stock market over the past 10 months-plus is that people are starting to get serious about return on investment from their social media/online community efforts. With marketing staffs and budgets cut to the bone, how can they not? Participating on Twitter or keeping a blog might be “cool,” but unless those efforts deliver comparable or greater ROI as email or search marketing efforts, marketers can’t afford to waste their time.