On the one hand, Social networking goes hand in hand with email. In many ways, it's email 2.0. It facilitates communication, helps you keep track of your contacts, helps you connect with new people that you could benefit from corresponding with, and easily fits into a cloud-based file sharing/knowledge sharing/collaboration solution. Lately, social networking platforms have become bloated with advertising, games, music, etc. Business social networking platforms would be to facilitate communication, not to turn a profit, and therefore would not have these complications.
On the other hand, there are many social networking platforms and none of them work together, while email is truly universal and cross-platform. Writing an email is simple and mimics the physical process of sending someone mail, while a new system redesigns the communication process. If we think of it in terms of a business process redesign, we can see it being very risky. The new system would require a learning curve on one of the most basic processes, and might make a firm less competitive in the short run.
We could definitely see not only the possibility of such a transition, we can see the benefits. However, the technology needs to advance a little more (towards standardization) before making any serious attempt to transition away from email. Even with a more advanced social networking platform that allows communication with other company's systems, this transition would be a difficult and expensive one.
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