As the world rapidly adopts the Internet in places around the globe, the need to properly communicate becomes necessary for everyone surfing the net at some point in time.
We have currently explored multiple media avenues such as text, sound or video to broadcast our thoughts and receive feedback on these ideas by our en-massed friends, colleagues or online acquaintances we encounter daily.
This revolution in conversation has ventured over into the physical communication industry of telephones. Cellphones that feature large screens and quick Internet has put the ability to converse with the world into our pockets.
However with the variety of communication media available there seems to be a popular adoption of communicating via text. This has brought about the benefit of talking with someone without having the compulsiveness to engage in small talk in order to get to the actual point of the conversation. The result of this has created crowd based micro decisions. For example the average college girl who wakes up for class to decide on what to wear, checks the weather on her phone and swipes over to consult her best friend via text. The possibility to accomplish something as random as this would be heresy a mere 10 years ago.
There seems to be an equal usage of most communication media except one. The art of text based messaging has by far surpassed all forms of communication many times over. The benefit to this has been in the amount of data it takes to transmit a text message compared to a video file. By typing out a text message your audience ranges from the poverty stricken third world country hungry baby holding a 25 cent cell phone (current price of an iPhone 4 in the USA is 99 cents) to the CIO of LiverPerson (text based customer service company). Basically your audience opens up the entire planet!
The next logical question posed is what’s next? Where does this open technology finally take us? I would assume that once companies who currently have an online presence gain momentum financially they would logically expand to hire a larger Customer Support Staff. These online chat agents would be the first line of public representation for these companies to the world.
Once a company becomes large enough, so too would the popularity of their customer service departments therein. Seeing as though each chat agent would adopt their appropriate work persona depicted through this online chat interaction with everyday customers, naturally leading to specific customers gravitating to their favorite online personalities.
At that point how long until these personalities grow their audience base to where individuals could get paid different rates based on popularity. However what if they took their entire audience to a different company?