If you are reading this content on a website, you’re obviously tuned in to the internet for business or pleasure. But what’s all this talk of Web 2.0? And what does it mean when colleagues talk about using social networks for business?
Online Social networks have spread over the web in the last few years with Face book, MySpace, Friendster, Bebo, Windows LiveSpaces, Orkut, Friends Reunited, Twitter and Linked-In as some key examples. They have differences in approach but all follow a loosely similar format – you join, upload some personal information and interact with friends that you connect to online. Some provide multiple games, platforms for communicating about specific topics, quizzes, and other fun applications.
In March 2010 Facebook became the number one most visited website, surpassing even Google’s home page. It represents over 700 million users, and cannot be ignored as a business arena even though it purports to be simply a fun website for social activities.
Some of the networks have more deliberately curried favour with business users, for instance LinkedIn calls itself ‘a network of professional contacts’ and encourages users to discover inside connections to the top companies and corporations of the world.
It lists executives from all Fortune 500 companies as LinkedIn members. It says that users develop a competitive edge in their career, headhunt new employees, follow competitor companies, and help the people they trust in return. However, because it maintains a businesslike appearance and has fewer fun applications, its remit is limited to 75 million users in 2010.
‘I LIKE’ – Using Social Networks
Once you have joined a network, it becomes part of many people’s daily routine to check it for messages, post comments and hit a few Like buttons alongside checking your email Inbox. As a result, business cannot miss out on this potential communication channel and most sites are peppered with adverts and web links. Advertising on social networks may form part of your business strategy, setting up a business page on Facebook or a Twitter account to tweet the latest news about your business, alongside encouraging employees to consider the potential of the various sites for customer contact.
Social networking can also be seen as subset of a broader change in the World Wide Web. This is a fundamental shift which is best summed up by a move from information gathering to user participation. The latest version of the internet is known as Web 2.0 which merely indicates that it includes a host of online applications which will increasingly impact on informal communications. Work colleagues will most likely be ploughing through their favourite social networks to look for business contacts, customers and new arenas to expand your business profile. Social networking within firms is therefore an increasingly important field and is ripe for more research.
Whether you are studying the social networking sites to exploit their potential for customers, business contacts or affiliates, or to assess how best to allow their discretionary use to keep your employees happy on their tea-break, take some time to get to know the different types of web communities.
• Blogs and Blogspheres (web-logs or online diaries, for example:Technorati)
• Wikis (information directories, for example: Wikipedia)
• Podcasts (audio streams, for example: Loomia)
• Social networks (for example Facebook, OpenBC or Friendster)
• Social Bookmarking or Folksonomies (for example Del.icio.us)
Different social networks pop up almost daily, so it is not worthwhile listing them exhaustively here, suffice to say that at any given time you can find Google rankings for new sites, and most of them are self-explanatory. Just bear in mind that any social networking policy document that you draw up must be equally future-proofed, with general guidelines that will apply to all types of sites, and even the policy document itself should be reviewed annually to keep abreast of new technological developments.
For more on social networks for business see Social Mediain Business by Steve Nicholls