Social networking – the internet buzz words of the moment! So what exactly is it, and how can it work for you?

I must admit that as a web developer I knew little about social networking until recently. I saw it as ‘something that the kids did’, and so that meant that as a self confessed grumpy old man there was little there for me to be bothered about. But then I heard so much about Facebook from friends that I thought I should at least see what all the fuss is about.

Facebook is addictive, there’s no doubt about that! Once you manage to find a few friends it’s good fun, and you can quickly and easily see what your friends are doing. It’s also dead easy to quickly write a message on your ‘wall’ so that they know what you are up to. You can be as distant or as involved as you like really. There are some people on Facebook who have literally hundreds of friends. I’ve got around 50, and I don’t think I would want any more as they simply wouldn’t really be my friends, more people that I’ve just met along the way. Facebook used in this way is aimed to be used by people who are already friends, and not those you who haven’t met yet.

There is another way of using Facebook though, and that is to set up a ‘Facebook Group’. Any user can subscribe to a Facebook Group, and when you write a post on your Facebook wall it will appear on the wall of everyone who is subscribed to your group. That’s a pretty powerful tool! The best example I can think of is also my favourite marketing campaign of the last ten years. It’s genuis, and it involves a small furry animal called a meerkat. Of course it’s comparethemeerkat.com which is a superb spin off from ‘Compare the Market’.

Quite brilliant really, set up an alternative marketing campaign which is far more interesting that the business activities of the real organisation (car insurance) and use social networking sites like Facebook to spread the message. Aleksandr Orlov – founder of “Compare the Meerkat” currently has nearly half a million fans on Facebook. Absolutely amazing, that’s half a million! So twice a week half a million people receive a funny message from Aleksandr on their Facebook wall and it doesn’t cost the company a penny – and all the time they are being drip fed the branding. When they want car insurance where are they going to go first? So there you go, Facebook – not just kids stuff.

The next social networking application I began to experiment with was this one. The blog. Today it’s dead easy to set a blog up. If you are a web developer you can write your own blog program. If you are a web developer with little time then you can install a WordPress blog (host your site with Elmnet and we’ll do it for you for free!). This blog is run by WordPress, and I’m very impressed with it’s simplicity and flexibility.

A blog gives a website owner the opportunity to discuss a subject online. There are two important factors though, the first is that they can invite the world to leave a comment and become engaged in the debate. The second is that they can do this in the framework of the blog, leaving their site to do the job of the site. Rather than have all of my rants and ravings in my site (cluttering up the main message) I can put it all safely to one side in the blog which is specifically designed to hold lots of text. There is also a search engine benefit to a blog. Google likes lots of text and keyword rich environments, and where better to put it all than a blog. I’m enjoying writing the blog too, so even if nobody reads it (though I hope they do) I find it quite therapeutic.

The final application I’ve tried is Twitter. I’ll be honest, at first I just didn’t get Twitter. It just didn’t make sense. One question, “What are you doing”, and 140 characters to tell the world. After using it though the penny has dropped. It’s been said that the developers of Twitter quite happily admit that it’s a rip off of the Facebook “What’s on your mind’ question which appears at the top of everyone’s Facebook page. I’ve found that this is what I read the most of on Facebook. I’m not too interested in the squillions of photographs that friends upload, or all of the comments that they make on each others baby photographs. Twitter condenses the whole lot beautifully.

With Twitter you are not limited to following friends, but can follow anyone you like provided they don’t block you. I’m currently following Lance Armstrong and Stephen Fry, and it’s actually quite cool to take a quick look and just see what they are up to. So the same opportunities exist for Twitter as for Facebook. Stephen Fry has 572,000 followers, and Lance Armstrong over a million. Everytime they ‘tweet’ a combined one and a half million people get the message.

So, clearly social networking is something that has to be explored. I’m not saying it’s the answer to everything and that it will work for all businesses, but it will probably do more good than harm.

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This entry was posted on Friday, June 19th, 2009 at 6:10 pm and is filed under Internet, Life. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.