Face Time in Digital Era

Great piece today in The Wall Street Journal commenting on the fact that even in a time when "digital" relationships through social media are all the rage, you can't ignore the basics of human nature -- face-to-face interaction to build relationships.

In a column by L. Gordon Crowitz titled, Social Networking in a Digital Age, conferences attracting technology geeks, trend setters, business elite, political leaders and so on is growing dramatically.

Interesting stat from the column:

• Forrester Research estimates that about 66% of senior executives go to industry conferences in part to meet one another.
• Esther Dyson of EDventures says technology types attend conferences because they "want to hear the unofficial story, rather than the sanitized press releases and corporate blogs that they get online."
• The business-to-business trade publishers belonging to American Business Media last year for the first time generated more revenue (over $11 billion) from face-to-face meetings than from traditional print operations.
• Association president Gordon Hughes says, "It's kind of like online dating. At some point you just have to meet the person in person."

Pendulums swing wildly with new innovation. But ultimately they find a middle ground. Perhaps some of the points in this column are pointing to a balanced use of social media tools in buidling relationships, and not rely on them almost exclusively.

My concern is that social media tools for many younger professionals have become more than just one of several tools to interact with humans, but rather the "tool" for social interaction. In the course of interviewing students coming out of college, I find many of them ill prepared for actually engaging in a conversation with a human being, let alone taking part in a debate on important issues (the norm in business), because they haven't developed truly "social" skills.

At the end of the day, it's about the human relationships we build. Not the tools we use, such as blogs, Twitter, Facebook or IM.