Social Media's Secret Weapon - Email

Fred does however conclude with an interesting observation that made me think:

"I do think the rise of alternative notification channels; sms, mobile push notifications, direct messages on twitter, facebook messaging, etc are going to move some of this kind of thing off of email over time."

E-mail is powerful. Groupon proved it to us again with their staggering valuation and penetrating marketing.

However, I think that e-mail is only powerful because it is the only reliable platform over which we have to communicate. Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc all have messaging systems, but none of them have been able to push through their own glass ceilings to compete with e-mail as a platform over which to distribute messages.

Trust, market penetration, usability, usage advantage... however you want to justify it, e-mail is "social media's secret weapon" only because social media hasn't figured out how to become more important.

E-mail isn't a secret weapon, it's the only platform available. Make a new one.

As far as the article goes i really didnt understand its objective. It felt like i was reading an intro to something interesting and then it ended.