By Tara Seals

Do you want to know what the future of business communications is? Try Web 2.0 and social networking. Not how people are using it today in their personal lives, with the phenomena of Facebook and Twitter having become almost second nature in society as a way to keep people up to date on your every movement. But rather, businesses are using social networking to interact with customers, develop product, go to market and in general, conduct themselves in new and completely revolutionary ways.

“The surface has only been scratched,” said Fred Briggs, executive vice president of customer service and program management for Verizon Business, who will deliver the opening keynote at next week’s VON Conference & Expo in Miami. Briggs will present his thoughts on trends using IP technology – specifically social media – and how these trends are providing a way to drive competitive change.

“Social networking is the next big disruptive wave I see in business IP,” he told VON. “I think this is a powerful medium that will become more so, allowing you to interact with your customers in different ways and empower your employees to work in new ways.”

He noted that most businesses still think about IP partly through the prism of the economy. “A lot of the discussions are about how are they using IP in the broadest sense to improve efficiencies, get to market, expand their market, and help in the global downturn to improve the top line, bottom line and cost. At any forum or event that is one of the common themes.”

He said that computing in the cloud, office in a box and virtual call center efficiencies are thus all recession-related hot topics in business IP. But ultimately, social networking strategies will empower employees to better collaborate in a centralized fashion in a way that goes beyond unified communications and cloud-based strategies that allow information access anytime and anywhere. Social media allows context and built-in feedback loops, for instance. It also gives each employee much more flexibility to collect and disseminate necessary information.

“We are now talking about technology radically changing the organization,” Briggs said. Other things that many industry watchers discuss, such as wireless broadband and unified communications, are simply enablers of such a social media-focused work environment. “Wireless mobility, especially LTE or WiMAX, will simply expand all the things I’m talking about here,” he said. “Unified communications will continue to inform how to communicate and collaborate and make it possible to combine wireline and wireless strategies. But these are enablers of things, whereas social networking is a complete sea change, a whole new way of doing business.”

As with anything, there are also risks and challenges. “It’s necessary to understand the challenges that social media represents for the typical hierarchical organization,” he noted. “There are big questions to answer.”

For instance, is your network secure? Do you lose control of your brand if your employees are given the freedom to post and collect information from each other and customers and partners without oversight? How flexible of an organization do you want to be?

“It’s not just a technology change,” said Briggs. “It’s about changing literally the very basis of how you do business.”

Verizon Business’ Fred Briggs’ opening keynote, “Migrating to IP-centric Environments in Tough Times”, will take place Monday, Sept. 21, at 9 a.m.