Email is huge for B2B. Executives -- especially those in non-technical fields -- generally couldn't care less about RSS or Twitter. But they spend half of their day in Outlook or (god forbid) Lotus Notes.
I wonder if, for certain types of worker, e-mail is stickier or more attractive because "doing e-mail" looks like work, whereas "browsing the Web" could be frowned upon by a passing higher-up?
I've always thought that RSS would have had wider understanding and use if Outlook could discover, consume, and display RSS feeds -- formatted as email messages so as not to confuse the user of Outlook too much.
True, I haven't actually used Outlook in years, last time I did I know the version I used didn't do this. RSS has existed in some form since 1999. Outlook seems to have just achieved the ability to consume the format with Office 2007 [1] [2]. And it's buried in the account settings [3]. Which I guess makes sense, but it really should be accessible from the folder pane/list.
Do you think that makes them more likely to read content coming into their inbox? ie- they use email way more for work type stuff, but they're indifferent when it comes to consuming content.
Yes, I think they're probably more likely to open email than the average user. But my point was really that if you've got something that executives want to read, then email is most likely the format they want to read it in.
And depending on the specifics, I'm not sure there is a difference between "content" and "work stuff" for B2B
