Thinking outside the box

Today’s social networking sites and tools are just the beginning.

By Lynda Rathbone

ONE COULD argue that social networking is just a new buzzword for what the internet has been about since the beginning – connecting people and sharing information. The only difference now is accessibility and user-generated content – everyone can do it. You can post, cast, blog, wiki, author, chat and video with almost anyone, anywhere, anytime.

That is a good thing for businesses and not just in some of the more obvious ways.

It’s not just about how you can use social networking on your site, post your content to them for others to read or participate in the networks yourself. Today, there are companies ‘thinking outside the box’ about how to harness the power of social networking sites by a whole range of new methods. I thought I’d share a few examples with you that I’ve seen.

Recruitment

The biggest recent trend is using social networks for recruiting and/or validating candidates via their networks and their personal sites. A curriculum vitae (or resume), a few references and several job interviews should not be sufficient today if you’re looking to hire someone. Not when you consider how much information you could potentially dig up on people, especially if they have a MySpace or similar site or are connected via a professional network, such as LinkedIn.

Suddenly a world of information is available like never before to potential employers on potential employees, which gives an incredible insight into who that person is – the good and the bad. And if they aren’t on any of these networks, perhaps that’s something to think about as well, depending on the role for which you are hiring.

Loyalty

Another example I found is a credit card company in the US, which is using incentives like loyalty/reward points for users (mainly students in this case) who sign up to their social networking site and remain members, giving more points to those staying on the site longer and those signing up to receive updates from the company. Some are also offering users an opportunity to meet others with similar tastes and interests, matched together with profiles based on purchasing history and the like.

As an organisation looking to get opinions on their products and services, it would be an innovative way to offer users/customers an incentive to give feedback, and it could be a better way to get customer opinions compared to surveys, which can be annoying and tailored to suit the surveyor rather than the consumer.

If it’s for free, it’s for me

The tried-and-true way to make friends and influence people: give something away for free. Traditionally, this has a been an expensive option. Who sitting at their desk reading this doesn’t have a free mug, mouse mat or stress ball somewhere handy? In today’s world of social networking, giving away something for free to get friends to sign up to your page is much cheaper – and is proving incredibly effective.

Restaurant chain Burger King has set up a MySpace page for ‘The King’, its ‘mascot’, and by offering a popular video, TV clip or song to those that sign up, he already has 114,000 ‘friends’ at the last count. This could be an equally effective way to raise awareness for a whole variety of issues and causes.

Professional Groups/Alumni associations

Finally, lots of people are now setting up alumni sites for companies, schools and other professional bodies so that former employees/students can get in touch with each other after they’ve left. This is incredibly powerful for both the user and the recruiter. While there have been websites for this before, it’s always been a burden on the site organiser to add people to the list, make sure their information is up-to-date and so on.

But setting up a page on MySpace, for example, couldn’t be easier! You just set up your own page and make the organisation your ‘friend’. Boom, an automatic network maintained by its members. You can use a site like YouTube to post videos of the meetings or events and link all that together so others can contribute, comment, network and so on.

While social networking has already come a long way, I believe organisations are only just starting to realise the great potential these tools have internally, as well as tapping into what is becoming a flood of information. As always, I’d love to hear your thoughts on this issue, so drop me a note to lynda@foursquaremedia.net. By the way, I’m not ready to publish my MySpace URL just yet…