Future trends in business communications: Phone stops ringing, eMail slows down, Social Nets & Media explode

I don’t know about you but I have been observing a significant shift in how people communicate, professionally as well as socially and privately. While only 7-10 years ago, most of the work was done on the phone (I recall living in .com boom-town numero uno, San Francisco, and using up all my 2000 AT&T minutes every single month!), eMail soon became big with everyone, and now eMail is still pretty much the prime vehicle of business communications – thus the rise of blackberry mania. Use of the phone declined heavily as a result.

Now, it seems that… well, eMail is for old people. About 18 months ago, the use of ‘social’ business platforms such as LinkedIn became more prevalent, and all of a sudden people started to have ‘professional’ conversations on LinkedIn, Ryze (remember??), Xing, and then, soon, Facebook, Myspace, and now… Twitter, Skype and GTalk. Now, for me, it has already become the No. 1 method of how people reach out to me: rather than calling (ouch) or even emailing (ehem), people ping me via my various networks – and I think this will increase drastically because it provides a build-in filter as you have to be in my network to ping me via the Network. More