Is Social Networking Software Pushing Email To A New Role In Business Communication?

This is more a personal observation than a researched study, but it seems that the role of email is changing constantly in the business communications environment as social networking software advances to play a greater role in this space.  It was just a short time ago when email was the backbone of nearly all external communication with customers and those outside the office — and instant messaging, along with email is how we would communicate internally.

The best way to really understand the change that I’m talking about is this: a few years ago when you stepped into your office or workplace, what was the first few windows you would have opened on your desktop? For most of us, that would be Outlook or our web mail accounts — which we open like a ritual since this was the channel of all communication and the application that connected us to everyone else.  Now, think about what the first few windows or applications you opened as you started your working day today. How many of those were social networking based applications or sites?

Social networking software is increasingly becoming the backbone of business communications. Just looking back to how I started this day and how I connected with others and communicated since the start of today is quite different from only email and instant messaging. 1) There was logging into our own internal community and checking for new discussions and updates to previous conversations. 2) There was checking our shared calendar for calls and meetings scheduled for the day.

Accepting some connections on Linkedin, followed by replying to some internal messages, and answering some interesting questions around social software in one of the groups. Adding my name to the attendees list on a Wiki  for an event next month what the next thing I did.  Then, replying to a number of direct messages and tweets on Twitter. As the day continues, I’m sure I will end up connecting and having conversations with several others before the day ends — and a lot (if not all) of these conversation will happen outside my email account.

Todd Famous did a post not too long ago on the CISCO blog on new forms of communications and collaboration and said:

“I used to get emails from friends through email but I now get almost all my non-work “email” via Facebook.  My legacy email account has turned into an inbox for electronic account statements and alerts from social media platforms.”

This is something I can relate to completely, as a bulk of the email I receive during the working day are now notifications for updates that happen across other social networking sites and communities. The inbox is working more as a place to monitor these various conversations across different locations rather than being the actual place where the conversations themselves happen — and that’s a significant change.

As we move towards using social networking and collaborative sites for more of our collaboration and communication needs, how do you see the role of email evolving within this new environment?

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How Social Collaboration Software Can Take Us Towards A More Transparent Business Environment

The economic crisis and global recession that brought economies the world over to its knees may be showing signs of improvement, but it’s impact is far from over. While the mood is slowly turning positive, the recession has left people more skeptical or more cautious over the financial system and the way business is done, irrespective of where in the world they are. With support from the media, there is a very strong resolve among people everywhere to instill change in business practices and ensure disasters of this scale don’t happen in the future. The millions of people who have felt deceived by the large banks and financial companies will feel this way for quite some time, despite the worst being over for now and for businesses everywhere the challenge of winning the confidence of their shareholders and people in general is going to be one they need to face.

The challenge of being able to create a more transparent, more accountable work environment is a universal one. Having transparency in day to day functioning builds confidence both internally within the organization as well as externally among people — which is why businesses have to seriously evaluate how they can move to a more transparent system of working. Whether it’s your sales team working with customers, management working with employees, management communicating with shareholders, company buyers evaluating purchases, or project managers working with customers, if you’re communications are transparent and there for others (who have some association with the work you’re doing) to observe, then everything is being transacted in plain view and the scope for large scale scandals, frauds, and misuse of position is reduced.

A similar challenge was highlighted in a case study involving Canada’s trade association for airports when they were evaluating a collaboration solution which would help them work with the several member airports. They were geographically scattered and there was no visibility into the business proposals and deals being made, as most of them happened through email discussions which were privy to the parties and it was easy to exclude people from being cc’d. While document sharing and collaboration helps to an extent, documentation is one part of business communication. Social software based collaborative networks offer a better more well rounded solution as they can centralize the documents around a deal or discussion and also provide a transparent platform for the communication and working that goes with it. In a collaborative networking environment, unlike email, people interact within groups, shared documents like wikis, forums and so on, leaving a clear record of the working process — which is there in plain sight for anyone to see.

Business communications need to be more transparent and corporate culture is slowly being driven by peoples need for more accountability towards being more open. There is a lot we can take from social networking and collaboration software technology there. Trade associations, governing bodies, governmental agencies, and businesses can all benefit from developing a better, stronger collaborative communication process which makes everyone more accountable and brings back the confidence to all involved. That is a change that can bring us all one step closer to better business practices in the future.

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