Social Networking

The main reason many companies use social networking is for marketing purposes and image building since social networking provides the largest focus groups. For example a lot of companies are using Twitter to provide customer service and take responsibility for bad service publicly. For instance many hotels apologize publicly to their guests for bad service, Hollywood stars apologize publicly for any misconduct and these are just to name a few. Another tool that is commonly used in the corporate world is LinkedIn. It is mostly utilized for business marketing as well as for hiring personnel.  As Frank Langfitt mentions in his article “Social Networking Technology Boosts Job Recruiting”- “Using Linkedin ...can scout a group of job candidates in just half an hour”.

You tube is used to share videos with customers as well as demonstrating and promoting new products.  Companies like IBM also use Social Networking tools for business innovation. According to Chuck Hamilton “IBM explores the new frontier of virtual networking and is helping companies attract and screen potential new employees through virtual world interactions”. So clearly there are lots of benefits associated with these new technologies: they unite the world, make news and products easily acceptable, increase the possibility of meeting new people, express opinions and share experiences.

On the dark side will be privacy issues and legal issues that arise due to social networks. For example students are turned down by employers for jobs because of the information that is exposed on the networking sites.

So the next astep in the technolgy evolution will be enhanced security controls to prevent existing flaws and the websites will probably become more intuitive and would allow to link all the enformatioon from different networking sites.