When I first started covering social networking about 2 years ago, I saw many parallels with email: a technology that changed the way people communicated that was adopted first by consumers before enterprises caught on. If you go back to the press coverage of email from the mid 1990s, you will find many of the same things being said about email (security, leaking of sensitive information, using company resources and wasting time) as social networks.
Based on a Nielsen study, (and reported on in the New York Times and on the Nielsen site) time spent on social networks has eclipsed e-mail.
Here is a graph from the full report.
The main take away is that social networks are rapidly becoming the preferred way for people to communicate / interact online. The natural consequence is that enterprises will soon have to follow the “crowd” in setting up social network capabilities for communicating with customers and for internal communications.
Tags: email, New York Times, Nielsen, social networks, usage
