A new piece of research by Nielsen shows that social networking is now more popular than email.

This will come to no surprise to anyone who works in an office or has teenage children. A preference for email is these days becoming the preserve of the middle-aged, just as a preference for talking on the telephone is the preserve of an older generation.

Sites such as Twitter and Facebook allow for faster communication to a much wider group of people. You may only have 140 characters in which to write a Twitter message, but you can relay it to hundreds or thousands of people.  As a tool for finding the person with the expertise to help you with a particular job, social networking sites are hard to beat.

Firms that attempt to ban employees using social networking sites look increasingly behind the times. Recently I spoke to the knowledge management expert Dave Pollard, who told me that young people in the workplace no longer cut themselves off from previous colleagues when they change jobs:

“They develop relationships that go on physically and virtually for a lifetime, and they draw on those trusted relationships over entire careers. So when organisations try and close down certain connectivity to make it available only within the intranet, they’re blocking people from getting information from most of the sources they find valuable.”

The way we work is changing – and businesses that fail to adapt will get left behind.