Social Networks

Facebook is the largest personal social network in the world. So why should any company bother doing any business networking elsewhere?

1. The Stats speak for themselves.

It is always a good thing to go do business where people are. Facebook has now passed the 500 million user milestone. If this growth keeps continuing soon Facebook will become the world’s first truly global social network. As a business you need to be there. Facebook is essentially becoming the new Web.

2. Establishing your brand on Facebook helps to humanize your brand – where is the Love?

Using Facebook people get to see what sits behind the brand. You need to be a part of the Facebook community. If you are considering developing your presence on Facebook it is where plenty of your future prospective customers are to be found. There is plenty of need for corporate and professional sites but with Facebook Pages this is changing fast but this will no doubt shift in the coming years as web traffic and individuals spend more and more of their time on Facebook. So it pays to build your community on Facebook. This in turn can drive your fans towards your company’s website.

Ignore this at your peril. There is a shift online and as a business you need to pay attention.

3. Trust and the “Social Glue”

S. Craig Watkins from the University of Texas at Austin spoke at ICWSM today about young people's engagement with social media. He has collaborated with the MacArthur Foundation and is author of the recent book "The Young and the Digital". His studies mainly examine people on Facebook from around age 14 or 15 to their late 20s or early 30s, in order to get a sociological perspective about social media and to examine the broader social context about social media practices.

(Sorry for the months of absence due to work commitments and travel. For more, see my recent blog entries at 1, 2, 3.)

While I was in San Francisco last week, I picked up a copy of the June 2 issue of Business Week which featured the cover headline of "Beyond Blogs".

Cork will play host to the 5th International Conference on Social Software - BlogTalk - from the 2nd to the 4th of March 2008.

The BlogTalk event – see 2008.blogtalk.net - allows practitioners, developers and academics to connect and discuss the latest trends and happenings in the world of social software (blogs, wikis, social networks, etc.). A workshop on the hot topic of "Social Network Portability" will be co-located with the event.

BlogTalk has attracted prominent speakers in the past, and this year is no exception.

As co-organiser of the WebCamp workshop on social network portability, I am happy to announce two invited talks by experts from the fields of the social web and the Semantic Web.

• Ajit Jaokar is a mobile web pioneer and a researcher on identity and reputation in social networks at University College London. Ajit is founder and CEO of FutureText publishing, and his latest book was entitled "Mobile Web 2.0". Ajit is also a member of the RSA and of the web2.0 workgroup.