The Communication Continuum: Unified Communications & Social Media on a Collision Course

By Tsahi Levent-Levi

Categories: Technology

November 30th, 2009

Earlier this month we held the RADVISION Unified Communication Summit here in Tel-Aviv. Somehow, I was given the task of giving a closing key-note presentation with the words “Social” and “Media” in it.

Initially, I hated the task – I always regard “social media” presentations as boring and a bit exaggerated. They tend to disregard marketing models that have worked for decades in favor of new ones, and they usually forget to indicate that for each successful social media campaign there are dozens of failed ones.

After trying hard to get off the hook, I understood that I had to give some presentation in the conference, and ended up talking about the fine line between social media and unified communications:

My slide deck from the summit

If there is something that I managed to rearrange in my mind while working on the presentation above is that there is no single, best way of communicating. E-mail is not going away; video telephony is great, but it won’t replace voice calling or face to face meetings; Micro-blogging is here to stay, and so are the other nagging social networks, such as Facebook.

People simply choose how to communicate with each other on an ad-hoc basis, selecting the means of communication that best suits their needs at a given time. I even gave an example, which got tweeted almost in real-time:

Today unified communications and social media are pretty much distinct trends: one is regarded as more suitable for the enterprise while the other is regarded as a consumer/marketing thing. And while they differ a lot, they still deal with the same simple truth – enabling communications.

This means that these two trends are bound to meet, collide and integrate . They will eventually merge  and become something new, something better. Better for us, that is, as employees and individuals.