Every day it seems that another once well-respected sector of the business world finds itself under fire from the economic downturn. For whatever reason, many analysts seem eager to add email marketing to the list of soon-to-be casualties of the recession. Tweets, texts, and pokes – oh my! (or is it OMG?!)

My advice to the pundits: don’t call the coroner. Even better, you can un-friend him on Facebook because he won’t be visiting us anytime soon.

Now, I realize that I have covered this topic on our site before, but there have been some over-reaching statements made recently regarding the viability of the email industry that require a response. Let’s have a look at what’s being said about email right now and think about what’s really going on.

From ReadWriteWeb, responding to a Nielsen report showing that more adults are now on Facebook:

Our take away from these findings? People prefer the clean, controlled, multimedia and publicly social experience of social networking communication over the relatively open, individualistic and spammy medium of email. The fact that there is effectively no data portability allowing communication archives to be ported from one social network to another as there is with email doesn’t appear to be bothering people in the short term.

While the Nielsen numbers do confirm that adults have definitely warmed to social networks, they do not indicate what people “prefer” or how they interact with them. To suggest that MySpace became popular because it provides a “clean” experience is patently absurd to anyone with two functioning eyeballs. To suggest that the 15 Zombie/Vampire War requests I have in my Facebook account or the now-famous “work from home” Facebook ad scams are not “spammy” is equally ridiculous. For the record, I would also point out that there’s a difference between being private and “individualistic” – I would consider my email account private, while my tally of Twitter followers skews more towards the realm of “individualistic” and ego-serving.

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If you’re considering launching an official company page on Facebook but are concerned about measuring results, you’ll be happy to know that the social network has recently created a new application which allows companies to delve deeper into visitor analysis. The application displays a graph which demonstrates shifts in day-to-day visitor trends. A drop down menu allows for additional graph customization in categories such as unique visitors, photo views and wall posts. You can drill down even further by downloading an excel spreadsheet with all the statistics side by side. The spreadsheet allows for comparison of various page activities and tracking new fans based on sex and age group demographics.

If you are actively promoting your Facebook page, the application allows you to quickly measure campaign results. For example, if you email a newsletter to clients promoting a Facebook link, you can instantly see if the communication yielded results by monitoring visitor spikes using the graph as a comparison tool to days when no communication took place. If your company advertises on Facebook and targets specific consumers, this insight can help you determine overall response rates, as well as exactly which demographic groups have been most receptive to your messages.

It looks like Facebook is making constant adjustments to the corporate portion of the site and is starting to understand the importance of measuring marketing results. There are still many kinks to be worked out, but the social network is certainly making strides in attracting advertisers by offering these new tools.

At the beginning of 2008, I had a number of people ask me the same anxiety-riddled question: are Facebook and MySpace going to kill email?

My response then is the same as it is now: email is fine, the kids are alright, and we can all play in the same sandbox together.

My impression at the time was that many industry veterans seemed genuinely freaked out by the fact that their own kids were now using these new and different forms of communication a lot more than email. And truth be told, the meteoric rise of social networks, particularly among young people, was (and remains) worth noting, learning about, and venturing into for some businesses. But social networks’ relationship with email is less about “this or that” as it is about “this and that” — the two channels are not competing with one another so much as coexisting peacefully within one online ecosystem.

One easy way to understand this coexistence is to take a look at clickstream data from this past week (ending 10/4/08), provided by our friends at Hitwise:

The above data shows that nearly 15% of all social networking site traffic is currently coming directly from email accounts like Yahoo! Mail, Windows Live/Hotmail, Gmail, and AOL Mail (These are 4 of the top 13 sites visited immediately before social networks).

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