Sunday, November 24, 2013

Email, SEO, and Google glass

An article in techcrunch this week discussed the changes developing with email: "Email is now just another stream" http://techcrunch.com/2013/11/22/email-is-now-just-another-stream/

The context of the article is that email is becoming a stream just like the Facebook and Twitter stream, and will soon not be seen as a method of comunication that needs to be responded to. This argument is silly - no one feels the need to respond to everything on their facebook feed as nothing is directed at them. In email, although spam and group messages are a plague, every email is meant to be directed at the receiver trying to get them to perform an action. The challenge is filtering out those messages that are in fact random ads, those that are promotions that you would like to see, and those that are messages directed at you that require an action. This is where google's actions are getting interesting.

Google has already implemented the 'social' and 'promotional' filters, and is working on ever more complex filters that will present me with what Google decides I want to see. It will surely soon be tracking my interaction with emails, and using this to impact the search results I see outside my inbox, making marketers link their SEO strategy with their email strategy. The possibilities with Google glass are endless - will emails from people that we see in person be prioritised above those that we haven't spent time with recently? Could Google be the force that makes what is presented to us online more representative of our offline lives?

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