The use of social net­work­ing sites in busi­ness has really taken a grip over the last couple of years, but surely enough is enough now!

Not another social netwing website

Face­book, MySpace, Bebo plus many oth­ers have enjoyed phe­nom­enal growth over the last 5 years, This is well doc­u­mented with the young upstart Twit­ter out­pa­cing many over the last 12 months.

Their use has leapt from the domain of kids and geeks over to the main­stream and more recently to busi­ness users with the oppor­tun­it­ies presen­ted by tar­geted mar­ket­ing to the tens if not hun­dreds, of mil­lions of users on sites such as Face­book and You­Tube, becom­ing more access­ible to organ­isa­tions of all sizes every­day. It is said that to a large extent, the rule book is being par­tially rewrit­ten as a dir­ect res­ult that these sites are mak­ing on the way people form opin­ions and decisions about a par­tic­u­lar product or service.

Added to this , there’s also been an expo­nen­tial rise of online com­munit­ies ded­ic­ated to par­tic­u­lar interest groups, brands and shared activ­it­ies when it comes to pro­fes­sional busi­ness net­work­ing, with sites such as LinkedIn, Ecademy and Plaxo lead­ing the field.

So social net­work­ing sites are all the rage at present it would seem!

Grasp­ing this oppor­tun­ity there’s now an emer­gence of third-party hos­ted applic­a­tions such as Ning.com and SocialGo.com which allow one to launch one’s own and cus­tom­ised, net­work­ing site for one’s own par­tic­u­lar interest group. Will it never end?

Social­ise Me

Just a few short years ago cli­ents were ask­ing me integ­rate “For­ums” or “Mes­sage Boards” into their web­sites. That request has fallen by the way­side in favour of “web­site social­isa­tion”. This, unfor­tu­nately I have to say, doesn’t mean I have to take their web­site out for a few beers to meet a few girls! Instead it means they (the cli­ent) want to cap­it­al­ize upon the oppor­tun­it­ies that the online social net­work­ing scene can bring to their own website.

Their request on this front, often falls into two camps and either involves deploy­ing “social media shar­ing or book­mark­ing but­tons” to par­tic­u­lar pages on their site — spe­cific­ally to those pages that have con­stantly chan­ging con­tent such as News pages. Or it involves the deploy­ment of a “Blog” onto a web­site. This lat­ter request has now super­seded the request for a “Forum” of yes­ter­day as the “in thing” to have on a site.

Hours in the Day

Don’t get me wrong here.

Social net­work­ing web­sites have their place and can be great net­work­ing and pro­mo­tional tools. But like any mar­ket­ing activ­ity, they need atten­tion and work to make them effect­ive. So given the massive rise in such sites with more com­ing online every­day; quite frankly, which ones do you con­cen­trate your efforts on? After all there’s only a cer­tain num­ber of hours in a day.

On a weekly basis, I must receive half a dozen “invit­a­tions to con­nect” from my online net­work­ing asso­ci­ates whom I already know from either Face­book, LinkedIn or Twit­ter (my three net­work­ing sites of choice). So what’s the point of con­nect­ing with them again on another site? Inev­it­ably if I did choose to con­nect with them again, I’ll need to cre­ate yet another pro­file with yet another pic­ture etc and quite frankly — I can’t be bothered.

Am I being cyn­ical here or do we think enough is enough?

What’s your pos­i­tion — are we all social­ised out?

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