A New Hope: Your Email Strikes Back
A chimpanzee being taught to ask for things like a baby. Robots applauding. Artwork being painted on a concrete wall. A gazebo constructed from old tires. A suitcase designed to transport wine. These are apparently the things LinkedIn believes professionals need to see.
LinkedIn is still where many of us maintain industry relationships, follow companies, announce new projects, and attempt to share useful information. Yet the platform increasingly seems desperate to become the next iteration of Facebook, filling its feed with viral videos, inspirational distractions, AI-generated slop, and anything else its algorithms believe might keep us scrolling.
LinkedIn is disappointing many of the professionals who still rely on it. Twitter, meanwhile, is all but dead as a serious business communications platform, having been remade in Elon Musk’s image and abandoned by much of the professional community that once made it useful. No other social platform has emerged to reliably replace either one.
That creates a basic problem: How do companies, analysts, publishers, and industry professionals distribute information that people genuinely need to know?
The answer, rather embarrassingly, is email.
The death of email has been predicted almost as often as the death of the office. Instant messaging was going to replace it. Social media was going to replace it. Collaboration platforms were going to replace it. None did, because email still does one thing better than anything else: It delivers information directly to people who have asked to receive it.
Email also gives the sender something social platforms increasingly do not: control. It does not have to follow a platform’s rules, win the favor of an algorithm, or compete with whatever viral distraction the feed has decided to promote that day. Companies can say exactly what they need to say, in the form and length they choose, and deliver it directly to people who have usually asked to receive it.
Substack (like this) offers a useful hybrid model. An article still lives on a public platform where it can be found, shared, and discussed, but in our experience, more than 90 percent of the readership comes through direct email. Readers choose the voices and subjects they value, and the content reaches them without a social platform deciding whether it deserves to appear.
Social media no longer reliably does that. Twitter once functioned as an industry wire service where news broke, analysts and executives argued in public, and customers, journalists, and competitors could watch an industry develop in real time. Without delving into the politics of it, that version of Twitter is long gone.
LinkedIn remains somewhat useful as a professional directory and a place to confirm that someone has changed jobs, but its feed is becoming increasingly difficult to take seriously. Watching endless videos of animals being rescued, old ladies being helped across the street, robots doing tricks, or people constructing houses out of dirt may be emotionally enriching. It is not what most of us wanted LinkedIn to be.
More importantly, it is not a dependable way to communicate with customers, partners, subscribers, or industry colleagues. Companies can spend days preparing an announcement, article, research report, or product update, publish it to thousands of followers, and have almost nobody see it. The platform decides what appears, when it appears, and whether it appears at all. Following someone no longer means you will receive what they publish, and that is a fatal flaw for business communication.
It also means companies have spent years building audiences they do not control. A large follower count looks impressive until the algorithm decides those followers would rather watch a chimpanzee behave like a toddler.
Email is not perfect. Inboxes are crowded, spam filters are aggressive, and bad newsletters are ignored. Sending more email is not automatically a strategy. But email does not require an algorithm to approve the relationship. The recipient subscribed, or at least has not opted out, the sender sends, and the message arrives.
The environment has also improved. Spam filters and virus protection are more effective, phishing attempts are increasingly identified before they reach the inbox, and users have generally become more aware of the warning signs. Email remains vulnerable to abuse, but many of its worst problems are now being managed more effectively than the algorithmic chaos overtaking social media.
The real challenge is earning the right to be opened. That requires useful information, a recognizable voice, and enough trust that the recipient believes the message will be worth a few minutes. Companies that treat email as another channel for promotional sludge will fail just as badly as they did on social media. The winners will be the organizations that understand an email list is not merely a database. It is a direct relationship with an audience.
Dave Michels and I will be discussing this in an upcoming subscriber-only TalkingPointz video. We will look at what happened to Twitter and LinkedIn, why social distribution stopped working, how we now decide where to publish our own material, and what companies should do when “post it on social” is no longer a serious communications plan.
We will also discuss the uncomfortable part: what is lost when industry communication moves from public platforms back into private inboxes, whether email can support both distribution and real conversation, and which companies are adapting before everyone else finally notices the change.
Social media still has our time and attention. It is simply delivering less professional value in return. Email, the supposedly obsolete tool that was never glamorous enough to inspire much affection, has quietly become indispensable again.
The full conversation will be available exclusively to TalkingPointz Insider subscribers – just one of the thousands of reasons to subscribe to our paid content – so you can hear us dish the dirt on the latest Musk-Altman online feud and how to completely avoid it if you’re not interested in today’s circus acts.
Up Next
I will still be heads-down for a few more weeks, sorting through, examining, and releasing all the news and videos that came from InfoComm. And I’ll likely have some demos and/or online reviews of some of the new gear and platforms. At the same time, Dave Michels is battling Europe’s airport mess, visiting a number of our EMEA clients and enterprise communications newsmakers.
Subscribing to the TalkingPointz insider is the best way to stay on top of developments in collaboration. For more information on pricing and processes, check the TalkingPointz website here or contact one of the Daves. Heck, it’s the summer, and we’re feeling good; maybe we’ll even offer a discount if you reach out.
This was originally published via our Substack.