When I first arrived in Britain in 1992 the only tools available to me for contacting family back home were post and telephone. Today, my children talk to and see their Grandparents every Sunday morning via Skype and can email them their latest school work. My whole family is currently tracking and conversing with my neice via Facebook as she enjoys her post school European trip.

But all of these devices we use to interact are still only tools, no matter how successful they are.

Our job at Global Beach is to understand how to help our clients choose the appropriate tools for their business and how to measure the success of that choice.

This is currently best illustrated by Facebook, something you astonishingly dismiss as merely ‘putting a pretty face’ on long-existing social media conventions. Is that how they got over 200 million users?

They clearly understood that it’s not about specific and discrete tools, but about evolving interaction and communication so that more people could and would use it. I wonder how many million FB users think forums and blogs are just for geeks, yet in some ways that’s precisely what they are using.

It’s the names themselves, the terms we coin that can hamstring us. The term ‘Web 2.0′ irks because it implies a fixed product (which it’s anything but). The same can be said about what a forum is, or a blog, or even email.