By 2014, social networking services will replace e-mail as the primary vehicle for interpersonal communications for 20 percent of business users.

Greater availability of social networking services both inside and outside the firewall, coupled with changing demographics and work styles will lead 20 percent of users to make a social network the hub of their business communications. During the next several years, most companies will be building out internal social networks and/or allowing business use of personal social network accounts. Social networking will prove to be more effective than e-mail for certain business activities such as status updates and expertise location.

“The rigid distinction between e-mail and social networks will erode. E-mail will take on many social attributes, such as contact brokering while social networks will develop richer e-mail capabilities,” said Matt Cain, research vice president at Gartner. “While e-mail is already almost fully penetrated in the corporate space, we expect to see steep growth rates for sales of premises- and cloud-based social networking services. “

Gartner recommends that organizations develop a long-term strategy for provisioning and consuming a rich set of collaboration and social software services, and develop policies governing the use of consumer services for business purposes. Companies should also solicit input from the business community on what collaboration tools would be most helpful.

Come and hear Ken Dulaney speak about it on July 7th at Gartner’s Tel Aviv Conference:  We will hold a special session on the future of Social Media

http://www.gartner.co.il/event/Gartner_21st_Annual_Regional_Conference.aspx?ref=hp#agenda

My forecast is that the use of email and blogs will significantly decline in the next 5 years.  What will take their place?  Facebook-like networks and Twitter- like microblogs.  The main reason for this is simple–people’s attention spans are getting shorter and shorter as a result of information overload.

As Sheryl Sandberg, COO of Facebook,  says, if you want to know what you will be doing in the future, you look at what teenagers are doing today and she misstates a figure that  only 11% of teenagers email daily..

Check out her speech here.

The real statistic is: only 11% of teens used email to communicate with friends daily — not email in general.

This guy doesnt think that email is going anywhere:  http://www.businessinsider.com/sorry-sheryl-sandberg-email-isnt-going-anywhere-2010-6#ixzz0rcJJEq7q

But I happen to think that Sheryl is right and I base that statistic on my own son who is 23 and a college student.  If I want to reach him, I send him a message on Facebook which he checks numerous times during the day–he checks his email about once a week….

What do you think the future holds for us?

“Some day the Advisory Industry may look different than today, and an example of what’s possible may be the manner in which vendor and user clients compensate their Advisory providers. It seems worthwhile for segments of our industry  to study this alternative compensation model, as it has been implemented successfully in the Wall Street Research space over many decades, being both useful and arguably more performance-based than what we’re used to in the Advisory space.”

A wonderful conversation which will take a while to digest;however, as we discussed in Tel Aviv a few weeks ago Gideon, the movement towards open content and sharing is pretty unstoppable and will impact the big analyst firms sooner rather than later. However, most of my clients (B2B Tech vendors) are not interested in the reports/content–they are interested in the influence that Gartner, Forrester and a few others have over the buying process. The Magic Quadrant still has a magic power over endusers in many industries who doubt the value of a vendor if they are not in the Magic Quadrant. This is Gartner’s power over vendors, although as you told me, it was not the original intention of the MQ but rather an internal exercise among the analysts to create a discussion about the vendors. When endusers stop asking Gartner or Forrester or other influencers in the Analyst market which vendors to use–that is when they will have to start really evaluating their model.

http://gideongartner.com/2010/05/04/advisory-industry-a-future-redesign-the-“payment”-model/comment-page-1/#comment-330

“Many newcomers to industry analyst relations believe that analyst influence begins with the first briefing. But analyst influence depends on many more prerequisites than just turning up and saying your company is great — even when you have an hour to make the case. Experienced AR managers know that there are more precursors to influence but, in the hectic environment of day-to-day AR, even they easily forget that poorly planned or executed interactions can slow their progress toward a position of influence.

Consequently, AR managers at all levels must understand how the early life cycle of each analyst relationship affects the time required to reach this position — we call this period the time-to-influence (TTI) — and must actively reduce its duration for their influence program to be optimally effective.”

“Forrester uses the term time-to-influence to indicate the period between the first contact with each analyst and the first point that you begin to achieve lasting influence over them. For many AR programs, this period is infinitely long — they never get there. But savvy AR managers take charge and:

· Plan to minimize the time-to-influence. Recognize that the effectiveness of your earn-side AR program depends upon how soon you can influence the analysts who matter. Together with your analyst tiering scheme, assess your analysts, their current relationship phases, and their propensity for deeper yet productive relationships. As with tiering, use the results to drive analyst-specific interaction programs.”

Paul Bradshaw, senior lecturer of online journalism and magazines at Birmingham City University, said the most basic tools that students should know how to use are Wordpress for blogging and site building, Twitter for live updates, Facebook for posting articles or videos, Delicious for bookmarking, Flickr for photos or videos, and YouTube for video. All of these can be used from the field with a smart phone or laptop.

The biggest problem is that once these students get out of school the game will have changed again.  Probably the best tool they can be taught is how to track the evolution of PR and Social Media and be ready to learn something new on a regular basis.

However there is no doubt about the need to have these skills today and tomorrow.