I just finished speaking to a good friend (a baby boomer) about why she (someone Forrester would label an “Inactive” using their social profiles) should join Facebook and Twitter. She was complaining that she feels out of touch with friends, family and generally what’s going on in the world as no one seems to email her anymore. The funny thing is I knew exactly what was going on with everyone in our personal network because I use Facebook and Twitter to keep in touch. As I was having this conversation I had a slight touch of déjà vu as I had the same conversion with the same person 10 years ago about the benefits of email of traditional communication.
With respect to status updates what is interesting to me is that she has fully embraced SMS/texting on a mobile because to use her words its “short and sweet” and “instantaneous”. After acknowledging this I went in for the close and convinced her that Facebook and Twitter had all these benefits of being a short communication tool with the benefit of sharing and receiving these updates from the people or entity’s you care about, saving time and duplication of efforts. And by embracing social networking she would be able to stay in touch with her friends and family far more effectively than she could by using email.
After finishing my conversation I jumped to my Outlook inbox that was full. And after digging out of it from an hour and a half I felt somewhat of a hypocrite. While I embrace social networking heavily in my personal life, as of right now my primary business communication tool is email. Yes I leverage online project management and social networking software for business, but unless everyone does your forced to adhere to the current standard of email.
Companies need to embrace the benefits of social networking, particularly short status updates as it’s the future of communication. Less is more! Imagine a world where you opt in (or out) of real-time communication streams you care about, receive short updates on things of critical importance while skipping the preamble and bloat of reading email. Think of how easy business communication could be if you were limited to getting your point across in 140 characters. Ahhh imagine the freedom!
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