Email is a thing of the past, according to Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg.  Although this might be wishful thinking on the Facebook side, I have been hearing a lot lately regarding this question:  will email be supplanted by social networking platforms?

 For sales and marketing professionals, this is an important question, and one that shouldn't be dismissed without understanding the changing communication preferences of our audiences.  The experience of dealing with a sales rep through Facebook is different from one who uses email and telephone exclusively, and this difference has to affect customer perceptions and eventual sales outcomes.

Do you use Facebook in your professional life?  Respond to this poll and see the results here.

On March 2 in Toronto I'll be attending a conference entitled "The Art of Marketing" with a speakers list that reads a bit like a Who's Who of popular marketing gurus, including Seth Godin, Dan Heath and Mitch Joel. Despite what has seemed like the drawn out death rattle of conference events like this over the past several years, this one has really caught my interest (and my wallet). If you're planning to attend let me know!

This fall I'll be speaking at a conference in Orlando on the topic of effective organizational communication, specifically to address how the rational and emotional components of our thinking relates to how we perceive and act on messages.

In this article from Network World, we see an interesting example of how when marketing hype meets physics, physics generally wins until someone clever enough comes along to solve the problem.

I recently ran across a talk from Oglive One's Brian Featherstonhaugh and was impressed with his take on the traditional (and some might say outmoded) "4 P's of Marketing".