Online Social Networking for Business: Their Opportunities and Risks
The impact of online social networks has not limited itself to young people but has also affected businesses. Although social networks such as MySpace and Facebook have acquired much press in the social networking space, other professionally focused online networks such as LinkedIn and Ryze are being used in many ways in the business and association realms.
The use of social network services in an enterprise context presents the potential of having a major impact on the world of business and work. Today companies are harnessing the power of the web to offer real time services and support to online customers. Web-based networking software and collaboration technology is giving organizations greater opportunities than ever to cost-effectively reach a large number of people—employees, customer, business partners, and others. The following examples help illustrate how companies can harness the power of online social networking for a variety of objectives.
Customers Relationship Development
Companies have found that social networking sites are great ways to build their brand image. Several social networking sites such as MySpace and Facebook have become a place for people to interact and share their opinion in the aspect of commerce and financial services.
In 2006, for example, Chevrolet and its Public Relations agency, Weber Shandwick Worldwide, Launched the “Chevy Aveo Livin’ Large Campus Challenge.” The aim of the challenge was to increase awareness of the new Chevrolet Aveo among college students, a group notably difficult to reach with traditional advertising practices. In the challenge, Group of students were recruited on seven college campuses to spend an entire week living inside a Chevy Aveo, with breaks only for classes and occasional trips to the bathroom.
The campaign was a success mainly because Chevrolet had encouraged the students to publicize their experiences. The students wrote blogs, created and posted YouTube videos and mobilized their friends by the thousands in groups on Facebook and MySpace. In the five days of the contest, the students generated 217 million impressions and got more than one million college students connected to the contest through Facebook, MySpace, Twitter and other social media sites. Not only was Chevrolet’s challenge far less expensive than a traditional advertising campaign, it also helped establish a more powerful connection with the brand.
Employee Recruiting
It’s not enough anymore to post a job vacancy on Seek.com.au, Hippo.com.au, CarrerOne.com.au etc. Employers are spammed with hundreds of resumes from unqualified applicants when they post job vacancies on such portals. Here’s where employers are using LinkedIn, Ryze, Spoke and other popular networking site for recruiting.
LinkedIn.com – LinkedIn is an online service designed to help professionals find and connect with one another. Users contact each other through a network of connections for the purpose of looking for jobs, business leads, and industry information. LinkedIn has over 40 million users in over 170 countries. There are members from all 500 of the Fortune 500 companies. LinkedIn members comprise 130 different industries, and include 130,000 recruiters.
Ryze.com – Ryze has the second-largest number of users following LinkedIn. After Ryze, none of the other business networking sites has any significant number of users. The biggest factor that sets LinkedIn apart from Ryze is that Ryze doesn’t have a referral mechanism.
Spoke.com – Spoke is the connection to companies. Marketed as the largest online business-to-business prospect database, Spoke claims to have more than 30 million contributors and 900,000 companies. Spoke makes it easy for business people to discover and gain access to other business people via detailed contact information and professional networking.
Susan Graye, Global Staffing Strategic Initiative Manager at Hewlett Packard has been a member of LinkedIn network for over three years. She has used the LinkedIn network in a number of different ways to find employees including: searching by employer past or current employer who may have employed people with the needed skills and experience, using InMail, internal inbox at LinkedIn, to request assistance from network or selected professionals to find a qualified candidate and employees based on references from recommenders, the process used on LinkedIn in which members of your network can write notes of recommendation for you. She has successfully recruited employees from sales to executive level roles using LinkedIn.
Internal Communication
The vast majority of organizational knowledge exists in the heads of its members. Inside an organization, a social networking platform can allow employees to add details about competencies, project experience and past positions, and to blog and share bookmarks. This added detail could greatly reduce the time required for organizational problem solving, through enabling faster connection between a questioner and the person who has solved similar problems in the past.
Best Buy Co. Inc., the huge electronics retailer of USA, is a case in point. Best Buy started Blue Shirt Nation, a community and social network that focuses on the blue-shirted sales associates who work on the retail floor. Within a month, the online site had grown to 14,000 members, mostly blue-shirt staffers. Blue Shirt Nation has now become a useful support forum that helps improve the operational efficiency of the company. Through the site, employees often spontaneously help each other solve retail problems — for instance, a new store display that isn’t working as designed — that in the past would have taken weeks to work their way up and down the management ladder.
Related Associated Risks
As online social networking becomes more popular and more pervasive, security in the corporate enterprise will continue to be a major factor. The essence of Social networking is increased interactivity. The interactive nature of these applications creates new avenues for information leakage, and makes them inherently difficult to secure. The more people participate, the more likely it is that they could divulge proprietary information about themselves or their employers. With the ability to post photos, video and audio recordings to sites, employees can inadvertently “leak” confidential company information and post inappropriate personal information that puts both the employee and the business at risk.
In July 2008, Janet a user of the Twitter social networking site claimed to be an Exxon Mobil Corp (world’s largest publicly traded international oil and gas company) employee, Janet created a page on Twitter with the company’s name, part of its logo and photos of an Exxon gas station. In less than a month’s time, more than 400 other users had signed up to receive the messages being posted by Janet. Janet has been answering questions about the direction of the company, where philanthropy resources are being spent, and even answering questions about the company’s policies. While the comments made by Janet were largely positive, they were nonetheless unauthorized by the company. According to a research this was a case of “brand-jacking,” an increasingly common tactic in which people falsely adopt the identity of another person or company on the web.
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