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Greg Hyer asked an interesting question in the Marketing Over Coffee LinkedIn group: what will kill email?

The short answer is: nothing. The slightly longer answer is that anything based in an open standard is likely to be around for a very, very long time. Back in the day – and I’m talking 1995 here – the dominant form of public file sharing and discussion was Usenet, based on the open NNTP protocol. Usenet was notoriously difficult to use, from getting a desktop client set up to finding newsgroups that you wanted to participate in. When the World Wide Web and its HTTP protocol crashed onto the scene, Usenet began its long, slow decline into relative obscurity.

End of story, right? Not quite. Usenet is still around today. Google Groups is probably the best known interface for it, but there are plenty of others, and there are still plenty of users active on Usenet, with over 110,000 still active groups. Why hasn’t Usenet gone away, when there are so many easier and better ways to get at the same information? Because the NNTP protocol is an open standard, and because it provides some basic utility, it’s still around.

The protocols that make up email – IMAP, POP3, SMTP – are equally open standards. Anyone can get a cheap piece of hardware set up with Sendmail or Postfix and have themselves a fully standards-compliant mail server up and running as fast as you can build it. There’s no one you need to buy software from or get approval from – you just build it, connect it to the Internet, configure your DNS records, and you’re in business.

This is why email will likely never die, at least not for a very, very long time. You can’t set up your own Twitter server. You can’t set up your own Facebook server. In fact, of all of the major social networks, the only one that promised any kind of protocol-based service with independent ownership was Google Wave, and that was killed off in just three years by Google after it failed to gain any kind of traction.

For social marketers, this is why we’ll be on the conveyor belt of “shiny new networks” that rise up, blossom, and then die, but will not have a stable platform. Each company in the social space is unwilling to open its code for independent implementations because their business models require exclusivity of ownership. As a result, the rapid birth-death cycles of popular social networks will continue, from Friendster to MySpace to Facebook today. On the bright side, it means that for many of us in the digital marketing space, we’ll have continued opportunities to find and seize early mover advantages from nascent networks as they catch on.

Be ahead of the curve: watch the referrers in your Google Analytics carefully. Look for new referring sites and check them out, perhaps on a monthly basis, to see what’s sending new audiences to you. The next big hit might be in there already.

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Let’s take a look at a few recent emerging trends.

• Google is rolling out Author Rank. This favors giving search authority to authors who have built up a reputation for quality content.
• Facebook is rolling out Graph Search. This favors giving search recommendations to your friends based on things you’ve engaged with.
• Twitter’s new search algorithm rewards originators. This favors you sharing things first and/or being authoritative about your content.
• Bing is testing out listing search results based on Klout. This favors giving search recommendations to people who have platforms and strong networks of friends.

Sensing a theme here? The world is transforming from a “what” world to a “who” world. The reason for Google’s dominance in search was because they mastered what. They mastered being able to answer what questions – what’s the best this or that, what’s the most reputable company for this or that.

Social changes the what equation, however. We first saw this with Facebook ads and LinkedIn ads that targeted the who. Who matches the job titles for the product you’re selling? Who matches the interests of your product or service?

Why? I suspect that in terms of search quality that who is somewhat harder to fake. Sure, you can have dummy accounts but if search marketing platforms are rewarding long term quality then even those dummy accounts must provide value. The who matters. Back in the really bad old days of content marketing, it was trivial to take any database of information and simply republish it. If you did that today, you’d need to provide significant added value in order not to be penalized in search, and one of the most straightforward ways is to add people, from reviews to social engagement to socially generated content.

Who is the platform. You are the platform. Digital marketing will increasingly reward both who you are and what you do, rather than just the stuff you create.

So what does this mean for you? As a company, start thinking about platforms in your recruiting. Imagine two employees of roughly equal capability, but one has a platform. They have a social community of peers that goes with them. Who is more valuable? All other things being equal, the one with the platform is more valuable. Why? They bring more resources to bear. This is true even outside of marketing and sales. For example, imagine two PHP developers. A developer with his or her own platform is more valuable because they have that many more peers to engage with and ask questions of when they encounter difficult problems to solve.

As a person, you need to build out your community and platform. Have a personal presence, have a network, be a resource or become a resource. Grow yourself into a hub that generates new business for whoever you work for. Participate in others’ hubs, from interacting with them socially to creating content for their platforms. Be a powerful connection for your community (whatever that community is) and you’ll add powerful influence to any place you work.

To quote Mitch Joel, it’s not about what you know. It’s not about who you know. It’s about who knows you (and why).

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