Social Networking

It's almost unbelievable how social networking websites have proven to be so valuable both in professional as well as in our personal lives. Frank Langfitt explains in his article that many recruiters have started hunting for job candidates using social networking technology like MySpace and Facebook. One such site is Linkedin, a network of 8 million professionals that also includes executives from all of the Fortune 500 companies. Although it seems a fairly easy method to scout a group of job candidates in just half an hour using Linkedin, as Company co-founder Konstantin Guericke says, but if he wants to develop a relationship with any of them he says there is no substitute for a much older social networking tool: the telephone.

Laura M. Holson writes in her NYT article "Tweeting your way to a Job", that recently many companies have begun hiring someone specifically for what they call a "social media whiz". Because of the explosive popularity of Twitter, a social media whiz monitors what consumers are saying about the company or their products on Twitter and take a more personal stance towards it. Laura also quotes in her article, "To marketers, it seems, personal relations (such as this) have become the new public relations." For a corporate, this has an absolute advantage. For instance Paul Gillin, a technology journalist said in the article, “All anyone has to do is tweet their dissatisfaction and a company will cave in to their demands.” Because the consumers are mostly average human beings, it’s important that a company reaches out to them and be much more personal than the average corporate P.R. guy, and Tweeter is definitely one way to do this.

Of course, Tweeter is certainly not without its limitations. Twitter was not devised to solve difficult problems. Josh Bernoff, a Forrester analyst and co-author of a book about social technologies, quotes, “You have to be careful about what you say while, at the same time, be much more personal. You need people who understand the mores and etiquette. Not everyone knows how to do that.”

As for our personal lives, social websites are definitely popular for keeping contact with friends and family without being too personal and without feeling like an intruder, and definitely for people who have a reserved personality and somewhat shy to socialize in person. Consider someone who's autistic, an autistic person has more advantage on a social networking website than an actual social setting. With Facebook and Tweeter, life gets easier as friends and family see my updates of important events, i.e. engagement or pregnancy, as opposed to I personally making phone calls to spread the news, which is really more time consuming.

http://www.onlinecolleges.net/2009/06/08/50-ways-to-use-twitter-in-the-college-classroom/

This website has some interesting way a college student can tweet besides hunting for a job and keeping in touch with friends.

Though, social websites seem like a great tool for both personal and professional use, it has its dark side as well. It seems as though sex offenders are at advantage with these websites, many have been successfully able to lure young girls to come out of their safe zones and fall into the traps that was set by these predators. Some were fortunate enough to escape though profoundly scarred emotionally, while others were not as fortunate to live.

I believe these social networking websites will be more prevalent in the future, it seems unanticipated at first that Tweeter or Facebook would go as as far it did now as far as its usage is concerned. Perhaps people would start sending out invitations on these websites, and save a few bucks there as we all know how expensive wedding, anniversaries and birthday parties can get sometimes. Or sending emails would cease to non existence because the trouble of typing so many emails gets old quickly, the convenience of typing a single sentence to update everyone of your recent event seem a lot more enticing.