Do you have a social networking strategy? Should you have a social networking strategy? We can help you find out.
The "big three" in United States are generally considered to be Facebook, My Space, and LinkedIn. While Facebook and MySpace are considered primarily social, LinkedIn is very focused on making connections in a business context: jobs, work related questions, and recommendations. What you get with each of the three is a large population of existing users. What you don't get is a lot of control over the look and feel of the pages. Let's take each one separately.
Facebook is a social utility, that is the emphasis is on connecting with your friends. What you get with Facebook are a very "clean" looking pages and a very large user base. In Jan 2007 there were more than 64 million active users. The daily growth was an average of 250,000 new registrations per day. The fastest growing demographic was the 25 year old and older age group. Summary - Facebook isn't just for college kids anymore. You can get a great deal more background on the site by going to the Facebook Press Room.
OK - we have 64 million users and a quarter of a million new ones each day. How do you connect to them? Click here for more!
MySpace is much more eclectic than Facebook. It does not have a consistent look and feel and to the new user seems more of a dating and connection site than a social utility. The terms of service specifically prohibit any commercial use that have not been endorsed or approved by MySpace.com. If you are interested in working with MySpace we can work with you.
The emphasis in LinkedIn is on "connections." Connections are different then "friends" in the Facebook or MySpace context. In LinkedIn a connection is someone you know who has the ability to connect you to someone you don't know. This connection is usually for a specific business purpose: find a job, raise money, etc. You can connect a variety of ways: directly (an invitation - requires the email address of the person), via InMail, or because you have a prior relationship (e.g. you went to college or graduate school together.) LinkedIn provides corporate solutions that are focused on job search. LinkedIn also has a question and answer section and a section on "Service Providers." The way one gets listed as a service provider is by recommendation. I did a search on 2/17/2008 of IT consultants worldwide and the most recommended consultant had only 24 recommendations. This would suggest that "Service Providers" is not a great way to get noticed.
My summary is that if you are doing a great deal of recruiting you may want to explore the LinkedIn Corporate Solutions.
Orkut is not generally considered part of the big three. It is a social networking site linked to Google. The vast majority of users are in the 18-25 year age range. More than half the users are in Brazil.
If it says windows you can pretty much guess that this is the Microsoft entry in the social networking space. Like Facebook has a very clean interface. One interesting component of Live is LiveSkyDrive (Beta.) This is a password protected online file storage facility.
The alternative to the big three and their large user base is to "roll your own" social networking web site. An example of such as service is KickApps. KickApps provides the engine and widgets to customize a social networking site. They reserve some of the space for their own advertising and make the rest available to you. We built a KickApps site as a project, you can link to our KickApps page by clicking here.