Jun 14 07
Facebook shows most promise for business social networking options
By Scott Sigler
Facebook is one of the top two social media sites out there, along with MySpace, the dominant force in social media. For all the hubub about Web 2.0 and social media, the question remains as to how these macro-sites will factor into the business world. And by “macro,” i mean MACRO - MySpace has 180 million users (source: AdWeek), which would make it the 11th largest country in the world were it a real place, not a virtual place.
But Facebook has a new strategy that could leverage it’s social networking functionality to business uses limited only by our imagination. The Palo Alto, CA, company has opened up it’s site to allow anyone to make plug-ins. For expanded coverage on this development, visit TechCrunch.
What does this mean to the business communication world? First of all, as we start receiving “digital natives” into the employment ranks, we will have millions of young workers who use tools like Facebook on a daily basis. Now imagine these people learning your business, your communication needs, the needs of your customers (the ranks of which are also going to be flooded with these natives), and your new employees can identify applications that utilize macro-scale, established, free networks.
For example, you want to easily distribute product videos? Upload them to YouTube (for free), then put them on your company’s Facebook page (for free), and customers start to find you based on your content and keywords. This one already exists - you don’t need a programmer, you don’t need an IT department, it’s all done for you.
Say you need to communicate product into to retail stores, partners or vendors. Someone writes a plug-in that allows you to push video, audio and document content to your Facebook group - which just so happens to include each of your retail outlets. Now you can provide a constant stream of key information to your team, information that they either consume immediately, or when they can get to it. Because it’s a social network, that team can trade notes with each other, info that can be shared all up and down the line.
The point is, no matter what your needs are, you can either find a plug-in, or WRITE a plug-in that utilizes the Facebook network. You create a community not just around your people, but also the information of your business and what your business does.
If you want to know more about Facebook and other social media tools, and how they might help your communication efforts, look around the cube farm for anyone under 25 - trust me, they’re already using this stuff.
