Wednesday, September 05, 2007

Business Use of Online Social Networks

Learning About Social Media from Your Desk

The eMarketer Daily newsletter reported in June that “nearly two-thirds of U.S. business professionals use personal and professional social networking web sites, according to the Social Network Practitioner Consensus Survey from the Institute for Corporate Productivity (i4cp), conducted in conjunction with HR.com.”

The survey found that social networks are used in large proportions to:
• keep internal staff and remote employees connected,
• connect with potential clients and showcase skills,
• job-hunt,
• share best practices with colleagues, and
• get answers to issues they were currently facing.

eMarketer quotes Jay Jamrog of i4cp: "We expected to see a number of respondents utilizing social networking sites like MySpace and Facebook for personal reasons, but we were intrigued at the high percentage of business professionals that use social networking for professional purposes."

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Online Community sites can be very helpfull for small bussiness, people can create a profile on their product and let people and promote them. Social Networking websites can be a great tool for everyone to promote anything they want from their ideas
to they products.

Anonymous said...

Online social communities are definitely going to be big within the business community. Corporate social platforms are useful for many reasons and will dramatically enhance internal and external communications between staff and customers.
Web 2.0 technologies such as blogs, wikis, forums, video blogs ans RSS create an interactive and social environment and should increase staff productivity which in turn will drive sales.
A more engaged workforce will ultimately produce better results in which employees should also get a stronger sense of a brands ideologies and increase brand allegiance.
Given these facts corporations should seriously consider shifting communications towards social platforms. http://www.brandstation.tv/

Josh Aronowitz said...

I absolutely agree it should be an interesting next few years to watch how all this plays out, the huge trend of social networks shifting towards businesses has become increasingly popular. Sites like www.octopuscity.com are integrating Web 2.0 networks with services like free CRM and contact management, free teleconferencing, etc. are going to proliferate.