Phone is King – Or is it?
Today’s Exhibit A is a press release from Vodaphone UK, based on a survey of 1100 business people in the UK. Their bottom-line finding is that “business people tempted to spend too much time online ‘social networking’ are in danger of losing out to those that mix old methods with the new.” Their more details findings include:
- One in five business owners won’t do business with someone they haven’t met face to face.
- Six out of ten rarely or never do business with someone they haven’t spoken to over the phone.
- “Business is most likely to be won from a face to face meeting (57%) than any other route, dropping to just 34% of businesspeople who have won business by email”
- Just one in ten use social network sites at all.
Sounds bleak for the dedicated web worker, doesn’t it? But let’s take a moment to think beyond the bullet points.
First, keep in mind the traditional question of “who benefits” whenever you’re reading a press release. Vodafone is keen to sell you their Small Business price plan, with discounts for telephone usage; it’s not surprising that they pull out statistics highlighting telephone usage among their survey sample.
Second, how could you recast some of those bullet points to sound better for web worker nation? 80% of businesses will do business with contractors they’ve never met; 40% don’t even care whether they’ve talked to you on the phone. A third of businesspeople have even won contracts by email, and 10% of businesses are already making professional contacts via social networks. Sounds a whole lot better for us that way, doesn’t it?
Third, what about the questions not asked here? I’d like to know about the rate of change of some of these things: how fast is social network use accelerating, for example? (To their credit, the Vodafone folks do mention that phone usage has dropped by almost a third in the space of a generation, though it appears they’re looking at subsets of their survey rather than comparing two different surveys). What industries are more or less penetrated by social networks? What types of business people are more or less successful networking over the web? What size of companies are most likely to win business this way? It’s possible that some of this information is in the original data, but I haven’t been able to locate the full data set online (another common issue with press releases).
The bottom line: a survey like this can tell us that many people still depend on the telephone. I use it myself, though not as much as I did ten years ago. But that’s an aggregate fact. It can’t point out the success stories for web workers and online networking, and to use it as an argument that we all need to enhance our telephone connectivity is a mistake.
Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.
We live in the Networked World, and our ability to connect ‘socially’ via our virtual selves is a wonderful aspect of this world, but it is not the aspect that matters most in the conduct of business.
I got my first glimpse inside the Networked World when I worked on TRON. In both a real-world sense (the network that created the film) and a metaphorical one (the ENCOM network of the film itself), we collaborated on a primitive social network. But the film could not have happened without a lot of face-to-face interaction– the people from MAGI in upstate NY getting face time in L.A., or without the director, Steven Lisberger, acting as the human interface between the art and the technology.
Sophisticated (relatively) as social networks have become, the TRON scenario holds true today. There are three levels to all communication — cosmetic, emotional and meta. Social networking is heavy on the cosmetic (dialogue, written text, images, clever apps, et al) and does a decent job of meta-communicating (our icons, personal branding, our professions, and favorites lists). But as human communication, it is incomplete, and because of this we cannot realize ourselves or our potential solely via these two levels.
The most important level of communication, the level on which evolution occurs and business gets done, is emotional (our desires, clarity of focus, our passion for what we do, our ability to collaborate, our level of energy and commitment). This level of communication almost always happens in person. There is no substitute. The savvy web worker understands that a social network sets the table, but human interaction makes the meal. Sharing in the wealth made possible by networks, and evolving into better versions of ourselves inevitably requires some getting out in the world and grappling with our humanity.
Mike Bonifer
http://www.gamechangers.com