Social media as a business medium: It’s already here, are you ready?

The way in which we communicate with each other has changed almost beyond recognition - and now business must catch up. Stan Lepeak gives some advice on how business can use social media and how to deal with it within the business.

Collaboration is a core skill in any successful business. The means, however, through which businesses collaborate internally as well as externally with customers and partners have changed dramatically over the past 20 years and  will continue do so at a torrid pace. 

Historically businesses were relatively insular. Interactions were conducted face-to-face, through mountains of paper based mail, and via the telephone, but only when in a landed setting. This began to change in the 1970s and 80s with the steady advancement of computing capabilities and the beginning of the break-up to telco monopolies and the subsequent decline in communication costs. Business computing systems began to communicate directly via protocols like EDI (electronic data interchange) but only in very structured ways to support transactional activities.