Just because the road ahead is long, is no reason to slow down
Ralph Marston, author of The Daily
Motivator.
We live in a ‘digital’ era where man’s technology landscape
changes frequently. Science fiction of the past (eg, robots and self-driven
vehicles) is reality today. Technologies such as videoconferencing, satellite
navigation, online video casting and instant messaging /message conferencing are
available at our fingertips. The world
has come a long way since the invention of the World Wide Web less than two
decades ago – in 1995.
It’s interesting to note that this advancement has been the
outcome of a post-war era, ie, the
inventions have been mostly business-driven instead of being defence and
armaments-driven. As the world’s population
heads upwards from the 7 billion mark (in 2012) towards 8 billion people
(forecast in 2020 by the UN), we can expect some of the uppermost needs of
business – to communicate with and engage
more clients more quickly - to fuel further technology development at the
ongoing fast and furious pace of today.
One of the foremost questions obviously is – where do we
expect our technology landscape to be in another two decades, ie, circa 2035? The aim of this blog
is not to provide a response to this kind of query which is best left to the
prophets to answer definitively. However
as it is widely recognized today that business not only drives technology
growth but also that business and technology are interwoven today to an extent that
one cannot exist without the presence of the other, therefore it’s worthwhile
studying the current upcoming directions and trends of man’s business
technology domain, in order to obtain a clear idea of the road down which we’re headed and of the new emerging business paradigm called Social Commerce.
O Solitude! where are
the charms that sages have seen in thy face?
Better dwell in the
midst of alarms than reign in this horrible place.
from
The Solitude of Alexander Selkirk (1782)
by William Cowper
All of us have heard that man is a ‘social animal’. What
does this mean? It means simply that solitude is abhorrent to human nature.
Human beings constantly seek the company of other human beings. This is ‘hardcoded’
within our nature.
Establishing a line of communication with other humans is
far easier today than it was 150 years ago when there was no telephone, let
alone email and online social networking. In those days verbal communication
was possible only by means of face-to-face encounters between persons. Long
distance written communication via postal delivery was the only other form of
explicit human communication that existed. The ‘delivery time’ of the latter
ranged from several days to weeks, sometimes months.
The breakthrough occurred following the patenting of the
telephone in 1876 by Alexander Graham Bell. Long distance verbal communication
became a reality in our lives. Using the telephone to socialize and using the
telephone to conduct business are so commonplace today that we do not even
pause to think that this is the consequence of a gradual evolution following a
landmark invention. Nonetheless it’s
worthwhile noting that irrespective of the form of communication, traditional social
networking entities such as clubs, congregations and communities have existed
since Shakespeare’s day (in the 1500s) and most likely, earlier. Commercial business
(eg, buying and selling, promotional campaigns, etc) was conducted within such
social platforms even in those early days. The primary difference between then
and now is the speed and diversity of communication via advanced technology
which has actually led to different forms of human presence/society being
created in the virtual space of high-speed computer networks where a human
being’s physical presence/location is superseded by a virtual identity. Conduction
of business upon a Social Media
platform such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Google+ or a proprietary one
within a large Enterprise, is termed Social Commerce; however the basic concept
of Social Commerce has existed for centuries. After all the word “social”,
being a key aspect of the human disposition, is bound to have a direct
correlation with commercial engagement which primarily involves establishing buyer-seller
relationships between groups and/or
individuals.
Since the invention of the telephone, a number of other long
distance communication inventions have followed. Such as wireless radio (of
which mobile phones of today are a more sophisticated version), television, the
telegraph, the fax, email, SMS, the worldwide web and finally, online social media.
It is interesting also to review the
progress of business communication models along with the emergence of these
technologies.
Use of the telephone for commercial purposes has evolved
from ‘cold calling’, setting up appointments, making follow-up calls to running
promotional campaigns/telemarketing programs and finally to teleconferencing with multiple
simultaneous participants in a phone call – a more ‘social’ mode of operation
without the need of all participants to travel to the same location.
For many years wireless radio was the only other form of one-way
media communication (eg, news, entertainment and commercial programs) apart
from newspapers and journals. A two-way
version of the technology was also used for transport navigation/traffic
control - first ships and then aeroplanes. Today’s satellite navigation GPS
systems (used in cars, ships and aircraft) are also essentially comprised of
wireless radio technology. Prior to today’s mobile phone era, radio-conferencing
of multiple participants using proprietary channels was limited to sectors such
as defence and high-powered government departments and did not evolve as a universal
means of social media type communication like teleconferencing as it was merely
another form of voice conferencing.
The telegraph was the first means of communicating encoded text
(telegrams) via high-speed long-distance links such as an electrical wire or an
ocean cable. In those days a telegram was often called a ‘wire’ or a ‘cable’.
Use of the telegraph for business and/or urgent personal matters was common and
prolific until the commercial adoption of facsimile (or fax) technology where
scanned documents could be transmitted and received via telephone lines. While
these kinds of inventions have greatly enhanced the speed of doing business, they
employ a one-to-one communication
model instead of the one-to-many and the
many-to-many communication models of
social media.
When commercial television appeared it was a more advanced
mode of technology than radio as it introduced a dynamic visual motion picture parameter to a media
broadcast in addition to the audio one that people were used to. However the
form of technology did not easily lend itself to multiple interactive
simultaneous (or ‘social’) participation as in a teleconference. Therefore it
has not progressed to a form of social media either.
The internet was a significant breakthrough in the history
of human communication leading initially to the creation of electronic mail (or
email) messaging that rendered telegrams obsolete. Ready availability of inexpensive scanners
connected to personal computers today has also rendered the fax as obsolete. The
massive power of many-to-many multi-way voice and data communication
via the internet is indeed a tremendous human achievement that is almost taken
for granted in today’s ‘digital’ era. Creation of the ‘World Wide Web’ in 1995 led
to a spate of subsequent technological development in areas such as electronic commerce,
including online payments/purchasing,
instant messaging, online videoconferencing and finally, social media.
Concurrently with the internet, mobile or ‘Cellular’ communications
emerged as an integrated form of earlier technologies such as the wireless
radio and the telephone. The first analogue mobile phones were quickly
superseded by digital technology which lent itself more readily to
communicating data in addition to voice. First text data, then images and
finally video, can all be communicated via today’s mobile phones. The use of mobile phone text messages are a
common occurrence today in our everyday lives for both business and personal
purposes. One-to-many and the many-to-many
communication using voice and data is feasible over mobile phones and smart
tablets today and this has landed us in the exciting new era of social commerce
employing social media.
We live in an era where its commonplace for an average
person to carry a portable easy-to-use touch-screen
hand-held device with advanced photographic/video-recording abilities that is also
internet enabled for voice, data and social media communication. Thus the
opportunities for humans to socialize and to communicate for business purposes
using one-to-many and the many-to-many models of instant
communication technology is far greater than it has ever been. The key here is
the social aspect of communication -
multiple communicators being able to interact simultaneously with very usable
devices in a ‘virtual’ world without the need of changing physical location via
social media. A new model of online commerce called social commerce is emerging in a manner similar to the emergence of
electronic commerce 15 years ago.
