With the younger generation using online social networking and texting more than web-based emails for communicating, marketers need to adjust their strategies.

If you really want to get young people’s attention, you need either to send them an SMS or post a message to their “wall” on Facebook. Don’t believe me? My daughter went off to Skidmore College last fall. I emailed her several times a week without ever getting a response. In November I created a Facebook profile (for research purposes I swear!) and within 30 minutes she had posted to my wall — “Dad?! Facebook?!”

Now just consider for a minute the implications of this trend for MSN, AOL and Yahoo. For the first time this past October, UK internet visits to social networks overtook visits to these types of web-based email services. Detractors may point out that social network users engage those kinds of sites differently than they do email, but that’s the point. Social networkers engage the MySpaces and Facebooks of the world in a much more intense fashion than they do their Gmail and Yahoo mail accounts.

As I see it, this trend is a clear indicator that over time social networks may eat into the web-based email providers’ dominance of the internet market in the United States. And should the traffic fall to these sites, we should expect to see advertising revenues fall as well. So the impact of changing behaviors around email may have a domino effect on the entire economics of the web.

For marketers using email to communicate to customers and prospects, the challenge appears even starker. How can you engage consumers in the longitudinal fashion of email in the very different world of social networks?

First and foremost, these marketers need to recognize that relationships shift from top-down to peer.

Social networking users closely — sometimes obsessively — tend their lists of friends and will quickly exclude those friends who cease to be useful or at least amusing. Marketers wishing to use social networking to complement email, therefore, need to create online profiles for themselves that allow them to interact with interested consumers. Ideally, these profiles should represent the brand as a real person, someone who has a reason to talk to the public, such as a brand manager or customer service manager gathering feedback. The profiles must be honest in the sense of responding to what consumers ask, not blindly spitting out the company line. A marketer could, of course, simply re-purpose emails to insert into social networking sites, but that marketer would end up talking to an empty room.

As I pointed out in my prior article, those in Generation Y tend to use email much the same way they use a DVR. They’ll read the message on THEIR time, not the sender’s — which brings us to SMS. If you really want to get someone’s attention from the Generation Y group right now, texting him or her is a much better approach. The very interruptive nature of text messages is seen as their real benefit. And let’s face it, cell phones are ubiquitous among the younger generation — 82 percent of college-age kids with phones used SMS in the past three months, according to mobile entertainment provider Limbo. Even the lowest-cost cell phone today offers SMS functionality.

One of the advantages of text messaging has been the ability to get it on the go. After all, people carry their cell phones with them everywhere. Email has been tied to a much less mobile type of device — the computer. However, the proliferation of smart phones like Blackberries and Treos has added a mobile element to email that didn’t exist on a large scale until recently. And as email goes mobile it gains a distinct advantage in that it crosses both the fixed and wireless worlds. SMS is simply wireless, and thus more limited than email. Accordingly, those in Generation Y might migrate to email when their abundant free time gives way to a career-type job.

Additionally, from a commercial perspective, a regular cell phone is viewed as a much more personal device than a computer. Think about it for a second. How many companies have you freely given your cell phone number to? On the other hand, you probably frequently provide companies with whom you do business your email address.

Similarly, social networking suffers from a timing perspective. Consumers check their Facebook accounts when the time suits them, which may conflict with well-timed marketing programs.

So, realistically, I don’t believe email is headed toward extinction any time soon.

The challenge, then, lies in marketers behaving more strategically to match the characteristics of these channels. That means that email marketers need to begin to explore SMS as an alternative to email for certain types of messaging (particularly alerts and time-sensitive messages) and to certain demographic segments (Generation Y). And they need to approach social networks on a more personal level. The point is to get your message to its intended recipient. You shouldn’t care whether that happens via email, SMS or through a social network.

You should care, however, how that message comes across. Spend time with the channels if you haven’t done so already. See what works in terms of fitting the space and what doesn’t. Successful marketers will adapt not just messages but also entire programs to these channels. Unsuccessful ones will simply waste young consumers’ time.