There’s a movement afoot that claims that e-mail is old news.  That it’s too slow for the modern users who are always connected and want to communicate in a faster and more fun way than e-mail can provide.  Social media is continuing its rapid growth and has even more users now than e-mail does.  It’s just a matter of time, this line of thinking goes, until e-mail comes to be seen as the digital era’s equivalent of snail mail.

But before you throw dirt onto its coffin, consider that it might not be the end for e-mail regardless of social media’s rise to power.  While there are benefits to be had from the kind of mass and instant communication potential that social media puts at its users’ fingertips, there are signs that social media’s domination is not absolute.

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The Washington Redskins recently learned the hard way what can happen when one of its employees uses social media to vent about his job. Either that or they tapped into a whole new and radically different way to address customer complaints.

During a lackluster 9-7 victory at home over the somewhat hapless St. Louis Rams, Redskin fans voiced their disapproval of the return they were receiving on their ticket investment by performing an age-old fan tradition: booing.

Their displeasure did not fall on deaf ears. In fact, Redskin rookie linebacker Robert Henson had a very specific response to the fans reaction and did not hold back his own objections by going onto Twitter to tweet off a little steam.

Among the highlights of the Henson’s comments were that the fans who booed were “dim wits.” He also wondered how people he described as working “9 to 5 at McDonalds” would be able to understand what’s best for the Redskins and that it would be best for them to keep their opinions (i.e., their booing) to themselves.

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Google, Yahoo!, and Bing each have “deeper links”, which are also known as “sitelinks” or “anchor links”, appearing within their respective search engine results. Deeper links appear under the main search result and show popular pages or top level navigation elements. The goal of the deeper links is to provide the end user with quicker search results.

Google has been using these deeper links, which they call sitelinks, for some time. The format of the sitelinks in the past has been anchor text or navigation driven. More recent results, however, have shown Google is serving content around their deeper links versus the anchor text. The additional content will help lead users to a better search decision.

Bing’s deeper links are similar to Google’s but appear to be more related to top level navigational elements. Once again, the goal is helping users find the information they need quickly. Yahoo! serves up almost identical deeper links as Bing. (more…)