Connecting with people is how the world works.

Years ago if you wanted to research a company and its services you would have to rely on the phone book, business pages, word of mouth and their own advertising. Today, you can ‘Google‘ them, read reviews and connect with friends, not just locally, but globally.

Social networking has changed the way business is transacted. Before it would take days to get that invoice to a client in Taiwan, today it takes seconds. You can share data quicker than ever before.

Similarly, as discussed, VOIP technology such as Skype has cut costs of communicating with the world down to virtually nothing.

Take my own example, before attending a meeting last night I grabbed coffee at Panera (free wifi). I proceeded to take part in a Go To Meeting conference call (dialled into the audio using Skype) with a company who was hosting the meeting in New Jersey, then I followed up with a call to a PR Consultant in Serbia – (who has his own blog, the RSS feed is published on the right hand side). All in the comfort of a leather chair and a warm coffee.

Years ago the prospect of conducting business with such technology and in such surroundings, for such low cost and at such speed would have been unthinkable. It helps SME’s conduct business on a global scale by using social networks to connect with professionals worldwide. (Services such as LinkedIn come to mind) The mortgage business is an example where professionals have realised the power of such tools.

As they say, embrace Web 2.0. It is the future.

P.