An Introduction to Social Networking

The term Social Network refers to a collection of individuals who share a common biological, social or ideological relation. The phrase Social Networking generalizes the current trend of emerging online applications that allow individuals to create symbolic digital connections with others. These virtual relationships allow individuals to share information in a variety of formats. Successful Social Networking services have begun around a variety of common interests. Some focus upon the sharing of photos, music or video while others focus around a common interest such as dating, wine or sports, others allow individuals to notify one another of their whereabouts, activities or upcoming events, and others attempt to encompass all of the aforementioned.

The ability of an organization to build social networks is fundamental to it’s success. Most business functions, such as the hiring of employees, strengthening of corporate culture, marketing of products to consumers, receipt of product feedback and provision of product support rely heavily upon the construction of meaningful social networks. The propagation and integration of technology into the lives of the common public facilitates the emergence of many innovative products and services that assist individuals in maintaining complex interpersonal relationships between acquaintances, colleagues, friends and family. These new technologies grant individuals an unprecedented ability to connect and influence one another instantaneously.

Organizations must recognize the relevance of these new services and learn how to utilize them in order to achieve their business objectives. The influence of globalization expands a consumer’s ability to access the goods and services of competing businesses regardless of their physical proximity. This emerging threat may prove catastrophic for organizations unable to exploit advances in social networking to meet the expectations of their potential customers, employees and affiliates.

The Dominant Platforms

Many web applications have developed in response to the growing interest in the utilization of the internet as a medium for interacting socially. Some notable social networking services include:

Flickr
A web application allowing users to upload and share their personal photos and videos. The service claims to host over 2 billion images from users around the world.

Youtube
A web application focused upon the distribution of user-generated videos, users are able to search for videos, subscribe to video feeds of their friends and use embed tags to showcase the videos they upload to YouTube on any website. In October of 2006 YouTube was acquired by Google Inc. for US $1.65 billion.

Twitter
A widely popular micro-blogging service that allows users to post miniature blog entries of 140 characters or less in length to their profile page. Users may post updates from a variety of services, including chat programs, mobile phones, web interfaces and desktop software. Twitter permits users to notify their friends about what they are doing at any given moment. The service has been used extensively by presidential candidates in the 2008 Canadian and American federal elections.

Linked In
A web application created for professionals that allows them to construct a credible social network in order to manage relationships with past and present colleagues and clients as well as build connections with companies, find new work and share ideas with other industry experts.

Myspace
A generic social networking platform that allows users to create complex networks of friends, share videos, music and photos and author blogs. Individuals on MySpace are generally very liberal with who they chose to friend. Many individuals have hundreds of contacts on MySpace with whom they have no offline relationship with.

Facebook
A generic social networking platform with features similar to MySpace, however the Facebook environment encourages interaction between individuals who have already formed offline relationships. Facebook surpassed Myspace’s popularity in April of 2008 and currently reports 110 million active users worldwide. In Canada, 6.3% of the entire population actively uses Facebook. In May of 2007 Facebook launched a public API that allowed independent developers to begin creating integrating their own applications into Facebook. As of July 2008 over 33,000 independently developed applications have been added to the Facebook Platform.

Blogging Networks (Blogger, WordPress etc…)
Blogging refers to independent or conglomerated social networks of dedicated authors who publish content on specific subjects. Authors provide valuable content to interested readers who may choose to interact with the author and other readers by posting comments on the article, thus creating a very simplified social network. Authors may create a blog independently by using hosted blogging solutions such as Blogspot, or may choose to run blogging software such as WordPress on an independently hosted web server.

In the coming weeks I will outline some of the services and strategies available to businesses that allow them to integrate online social networking into their daily operations. I will discuss how online social networks may be leveraged to provide a business with a competitive advantage in the realms of Marketing, Contact Management and Project Management. Additionally I will introduce the concept of application development for online social networks, specifically how brands can utilize the popularity of social networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace to add value to their existing products and services and nurture a healthy online integration of the brand into the online lives of consumers.