Although I'm barely in my 30's I was raised in, and spent most of my time in a work environment that relied on phones with multiple lines as our main source of communication. There was no IM in the early and mid 90's.
If you wanted to get things done you called or, gasp, set up a face to face meeting! That's the way it was, and still is in offline businesses. The phone and face to face meetings still rules.
But, in this biz it seems that most of the people are phone-averse. They don't like to be called... they would rather be contacted via IM. I see so many threads where people complain about a host or sponsor and say, "I can't contact anyone!" but they never even tried to call the toll free number on the site that a person picks up every time.
I thought of this because I recently had a text conversation with the owner of
Autoblogger Pro. He suggested a phone conversation. That surprised me since NO ONE ever does that and I know he is a web based worker. Yunno what... we exchanged more info in that conversation than we could have in 10 IM sessions!
I'm not the only one thinking about this. One of my favorite tech related blogs Web
Worker Daily recently had a
thread on the subject.
What do you think about phones vs. electronic communication for biz? Do you still pick up a phone to do deals?