Social Networking</h3>

From Business Risk To Boom

It may have once been considered a risky to have a social networking account where your boss might someday spot something you said that he/she didn’t agree with. The next step was the unemployment line. Although you still need to have some judgment about what you write online, many employers have come to regard social networking as a new boom area where their employees can also serve as an unofficial marketing force generating good will, sales exposure, and better profits. So what is it that has caused this massive shift in perception where online social networking is becoming an important strategy for the new business world?
The Impact of the Internet on Advertising

Mostly, it’s been the evolvement of the Internet as a major news, media, and information resource for the average consumer that has changed how companies view social networking. In the past, big companies devoted massive amounts of money to advertising spots on television, radio, and in print to get the type of exposure that is now easily available to any new entrepreneur in the marketplace via the Internet. Meanwhile, the influence of television, newspapers, and the radio has decreased in proportion to the same amount the Internet has taken on the same role. As marketplaces become e global, it’s important that companies have an online presence, and this is working for them to bring in new customers just as television, print, and radio used to before.

The original wave of online business activity focused most of this activity on creating websites that attracted traffic via major search engines. This was a centralized approach, much like a company publishing its own newspaper for others to read. Companies had complete control over what went on at their websites, and they continued to do business in a centralized fashion until other types of sites wrestled control from their hands.

It became so easy for consumers to connect with each other and to tell each other what the real scoop was on different products and services that soon people were logging more often into places that rated everything from trip ticket services to apartment complexes. By using third-party membership sites, consumers who already bought these products or services could relay the experience of ownership to others without the potential customer needing to rely on a selling entity to tell them about the product. This brought about a huge democratization of information related to price, quality, and ownership experience that was previously indeterminate for the average consumer, and it definitely influenced their buying behavior.

Social Networking

Read more on this subject in later posts.

Brett