http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/social-media/10864320/Email-is-dead-for-todays-students-who-prefer-Twitter-universities-say.html
"most
students no longer checked their emails regularly and were choosing to tweet
for help rather than wait for a response in their inbox." ... "Students will tweet for help if something has gone wrong"... "You can't leave things a week or two. Email is
slower.”"
Not sure why their emails are taking two weeks, in my experience they take a few seconds to cross the Atlantic and bring a notification up on my phone. That said, in an emergency its definitely quicker to tweet, subject lines and niceties are undoubtedly a hindrance:
The problem with reporting problems in this way is that the social media guru's manning the tweet deck 24/7 are rarely the font of all knowledge.
My experience goes something like this:
- User sends Tweet for Help
- Social Media bod sends high priority email to someone in a department they think can help
- That person forwards the high priority email to someone who really can help
- That person (me) replies by email to the Social Media bod and the person that forwarded it
- Social media bod tries to condense reply down to 140 chars
Or they reply with Helpdesk details / email address...
The main message I took from that article was these students are probably unemployable. In fact, a colleague recently emailed a "digital native" in connection with a job application, they never got a reply. We didn't have their Twitter Handle and if we did are not inclined to discuss recruitment publicly #downer
