“Email is for Old People”
By Robyn Logan,
Director of Strategy, ICA
“Email is for old people, the only time I use email is when I talk to my Mum ”
“You have to slow down when you talk to teachers”
These quotes are from a 14 year old schoolgirl in Scotland. Her chosen forms of communication are SMS and Instant Messenger. She thinks of asynchronous communication as outdated.
I came across these quotes in a great podcast the other day by an Australian man, Michael Coghlan. It is an analysis of a recent conference presentation by Marc Prensky who wrote an article called Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants [Download Article] There was something Michael said when he was talking about Marc Prensky and his ideas on technological change and education that made me think of myself and my colleagues.
I invite you to listen to the podcast:
http://michaelc.podomatic.com/enclosure/2006-03-05T06_14_42-08_00.mp3
The bit that caught my attention was where he talks about not teaching education professionals to “learn” new technologies but rather to “know about” new technologies. There is a distinct difference here. Over the past 5 years or so there has been significant pressure on school teachers and academics to learn how to use new technologies and how to integrate them with their teaching. It would be an understatement to say that many are struggling. After all, they are not native speakers of this new language. Many coaches I know are in the same boat. They are aged between 40 and 60 (on average) and did not even grow up with email let alone SMS, Blogs, RSS feeds etc.
The problem of course is that these are the communication methods of the present and future and to ignore them is to deny yourself access to whole markets of people who would potentially be interested in your product or service. They are also the tools of choice for online marketers so if you do any sort of business on the internet then wikis, podcasts and blogs could make a huge difference to your business.
So - what to do?
I suggest we take the approach mentioned in the podcast - make yourself aware of what is around. Have a try using them if you like, but don’t stress! The main thing is that you know what there is to know. Then you can pay other people to make it happen. It’s a bit like building a house, you need to know what is possible so you can design your home, but you dont need to be an engineer or a building surveyor.
With this in mind I invite you to make it your mission to find out all you can about the following tools and technologies and think about how they might apply to your business:
- Blogs
- RSS Feeds
- Wikis
- SMS
- IM
- Flickr
- BitTorrent
- tagging (”folksonomy”)
Have fun!