London trip and email is not dead!

I have been to London many times and although it would be nice to be going to new places every time, there are cities that you want to go back to. This year, next year, every year. London is one of them. This week I attended a training on alumni and social media which is why I had a few days to embrace yet again the city of double-dekker buses, old looking black cabs, amazing shopping and, not to forget, the English politeness.

It rains there as much if not more than it does in Holland, but there is no cold wind that can blow you off the bike path here in Amsterdam. It is busy, so busy that if you manage to get into the tube in the rush hour, you will be squeezed and pulled in all directions. Yet it is one of my favourite places to go to. Every time.

The training was very insightful and quite intense. Referring to my previous post, I do not adopt the latest technology quickly, which is my deliberate choice. However, lately I have become a lot more interested and active with social media. It is amazing how much is it out there to do: to include into your post, link it, add the tag, newsfeed, like it button, create a fan page, link your twitter to your facebook etc etc I have to say I was overwhelmed by it all and the 52 notes I made during the training seems to be too much to use all at once.

What was interesting to hear was that email is by far not dead and still should be widely used to communicate to the target audience. When I find 3874634 emails of promotions, special deals and notification that I won a lottery, I get nothing but annoyed. The only exception would be amazon, who was a pioneer in sending the “You might also like this” emails. I do sometimes quickly browse through their emails.

So what realistically are the chances of one email, that is in the same category, to be noticed out of the bunch? Flashy images, catchy phrases-they all do it, they all use it. Besides, our private email addresses are full of numerous promo emails, most of which go straight to the trash folder unopened.

This brings me back to the issue of information overload and how much more effort do we have to put in to filter the constant stream of messages every day. It is exhausting and yet we do it.