As a follow-up to our post  predicting a decline in personal email use caused by the increase use of social networks, we look at how this prediction might mean a change to how businesses communicate with their customers.

A big part of today’s personal email use has to do with consumers engaging with business.  From email newsletters through to things like your bank notifying you of daily transactions on your credit card, many people use email as a way to receive communications from the businesses they use.

As people shift towards using social networks for communicating with friends and family, it is likely that people’s Internet time will shift away from their email program.  This will gradually reduce the convenience aspect of having email messages sent to customers as customers spend more time on social networks.  This means that businesses might have to consider becoming part of social networks!

So how would this work?  Well, the first thing you’ll see is businesses creating profiles on social networks.  For example, a major bank like Citibank could have a profile like "Citibank Personal Banking" used to communicate with its personal banking customers.  If you are a Citibank customer, you could add this profile to your contact list on your social network.  As part of this addition, you can grant permission for "Citibank Personal Banking" to send you private messages.  Lastly, you log-in to your web banking account, and change your "notify me daily of activity on my credit card" to your nominated social network instead of your email address.  From then on, you get your Citibank messages conveniently on your social network instead of your email adddress.

Now some of you might think this is very far-fetched, but it didn’t take long for this capability to exist for email.  And it probably will not take long for social networks to accomodate profiles representing business entities, and provide additional applications to support communication between businesses and their customers.  Most of the technology for this to occur is already in place — the challenge is changing the behaviour of businesses and consumers, and getting them to accept this new form of communication.

It’s hard to predict when all this will happen, but it will be interesting to watch what evolves:

• Social networks will need to maintain tight control over businesses creating profiles to prevent false identities being created, such as what exists in email (e.g. the "phishing" email trend where criminals send fake emails claiming to be your bank, asking you for your personal details).  Social networks will also need to manage naming rights to prevent what happens with domain names, such as people buying a name and attempting to sell it to a higher bidder (e.g. a business could call itself "Citibank Cafe" and get the name "Citibank", knowing it could sell the name to the bank "Citibank" at a premium).
• There are several commercial models social networks might adopt for allowing businesses to partake in social networks.  You could see social networks charging fees to businesses for having profiles, and maybe even per-message fees (like what’s charged for sending text messages on mobile phones).  The "trusted" network provided by social networks could attract premium fees for businesses wanting to communicate with its customers on social networks.
• Social networks might take on large online directory businesses like Yellow and White pages.  We could see social networks offering businesses to be included in a searchable directory.  This directory could be highly controlled by social networks (e.g. to prevent fraud from fake profiles), and made searchable to users on the social network, allowing users to add businesses to their social network in numerous ways, such as our earlier example of receiving messages from Citibank, or maintaining a list of your favourite restaurants, etc.  Perhaps one day on Facebook you’ll be able to create an event like "My birthday dinner", schedule it at your favourite restaurant (from your list), invite your friends from your network, and then share pictures after the event.
• Will social networks be self-regulated or will countries be allowed to enforce their own laws and be able to police social networks.
• Will their be a market for the buying and selling of individual social networks?   For example, can one business buy another business’ social network?