Not too long ago, it seems, we drove to our nearby office, performed our job responsibilities for the civilized hours of 9 to 5, and then returned home to spend time with friends and family. The lines between work and home were clear: business was business and personal was personal.

All that changed with the acceptance of telecommuting, flextime, work-from-home positions, and the always-on connectivity of mobile devices. Traditional lines between business and personal are nearly gone now. A paradigm shift, to be sure, and one that social networking takes one step further: Your entire persona, both personal and professional, can now often be found in one online profile or blog site.

So how does this transparent and unified existence benefit you as a professional? Quite simply, those online personal tidbits enable people to get to know you better. Sure, you focus on business during a sales call. But perhaps just as important, you want to know the person, too. As I once heard a top salesman say, “People buy from other people.”

That little saying becomes more profound the longer you think about it. To learn about the people you’re doing business with—and for them to learn about you—there are few methods as efficient as social networking.

Social media is a term used to describe a wide variety of Internet-based tools—also known as social networking tools—for sharing and discussing information. Social media typically integrates technology, social interaction, and the blending of text, pictures, video, and audio. Each social medium is uniquely defined by the varied contributor perspectives and by the creation of shared meaning, as contributors offer the benefit of their stories and experiences.

Social networking tools and sites for business are abundant. They range from general interest sites such as MySpace and Facebook, to niche sites like Covestor^[1] (investors) or LinkedIn (professionals) that appeal to specific areas of interest. Shared among these sites, however, is the ability to publicly connect with others who share an interest in a particular area, and the ability to e-mail and instant message privately within the site.

Although social networking might be a relatively new phenomenon, the concepts behind the technology have been around since humans first lived in community. Human interaction—exchanging information, advice, and cooperative work—has been going on for thousands of years. In his recent book Basic Instincts—Human Nature and the New Economics, Peter Lunn said, “Highly complex social exchanges between non-relatives take place in every human culture, including the last few hunter-gatherer tribes.”^[2] But now, thanks to orders-of-magnitude advances in technology, we are no longer constrained by geographic location or cultural barriers.

Perhaps most profoundly, our social circle has likewise enjoyed a similar advance through social networking. We do not necessarily personally know those with whom we network socially. We’ve often never met (and might never personally meet) those with whom we interact, and we don’t need to. Instead, our social and professional circles have expanded to include not only those whose telephone or e-mail we have in our Blackberry, but also to anyone in the connected world who shares our interests, aspirations, or expertise.

The choices in social networking can seem overwhelming to anyone who first ventures into this world. But you need to use these tools—to stay competitive, to stay current, and to gain priceless insights from the ongoing cyber-conversation. A look at some of the choices most widely used today and their potential use in your business is a good place to start.

Leveraging the trend toward language devolution first seen in text-messaging (you know: CUL8R, LOL, and so on), Twitter is a micro-blogging site. No windy e-mails here; you have 140 characters to answer a simple question: “What are you doing?”

At the beginning of Chapter 4, “Blogs: Your Personal News Outlet,” we learned about IBM Lotus executive Ed Brill’s blog success. Ed’s use of social networking tools extends beyond blogs, and the personal touch he brings to his customers is strengthened significantly through his use of Twitter:

In Chapter 1, “Dawn of the Social Age,” we talked about the cost of communication and about the way communities expand as communication costs decrease. Ed’s experience is typical in the Social Age. Someone he never met before in person, who lives on the other side of the world, feels comfortable addressing Ed as a personal acquaintance when he finally meets him.

If you tell this story to someone born before 1950, don’t be surprised if you get a shake of the head and a comment like, “Too much for me” in response. But even many pre-boomers are starting to get into the act when it comes to social networking. Grandparents are beginning to realize Facebook and other social tools are an easy way to keep up with what’s going on with their children and grandchildren.

We should have known the days of the business card were numbered the first time we saw someone “beam” their contact information to someone else’s PDA. Remember those stacks of business cards in your bottom drawer, neatly sorted alphabetically and bound with a rubber band? Sometimes you found time to enter the information in your database, sometimes you didn’t. Then, inevitably, the day arrived when you needed to contact one of those people. You couldn’t remember his name, and you spent half an hour flipping through all the business cards to jog your memory. You met him at MacWorld; he was wearing a blue Hawaiian shirt. You think his name was Barry. Or was it Gary?

And then LinkedIn arrived. Today your “so-last-millennium” request for a business card is likely met with a blank look. “I’m on LinkedIn” is now the standard reply. LinkedIn virtually eliminates the need for business cards, while offering incredibly detailed personal and professional profiles that provide you with powerful business intelligence. LinkedIn users have the option to provide work history, professional and personal recommendations, and even upload a profile photo. If you’re good with faces, but not names, this is a huge help!

Don’t think of LinkedIn, however, as merely an electronic replacement for business cards. As a social networking site, LinkedIn allows you to take these relationships to the next logical step. You can stay in contact with colleagues through LinkedIn status updates sent to your e-mail account, and third-party plug-ins allow you to customize your online persona. You can also grow your network by automatically seeing LinkedIn “connections.” You might think you have only 50 people in your professional network. However, LinkedIn tracks connections of connections; meaning that even if your 50 contacts have only 50 contacts each, you’re already connected to 2,500 people. You can quickly request introductions within the extended network by simply tracing your connections. Talk about “degrees of separation!”

LinkedIn Groups allows members to gather virtually around a particular topic, brand, or event. Hundreds of Groups are available for everything from software professionals to trade shows to groups of employees from a particular company. Groups can poll members with discussion items or share news articles. LinkedIn Groups provide professionals with a great way to share their knowledge or publicize their skills.

In October 2008, Laurisa Rodriguez was in a difficult spot when her job at IBM was eliminated. She had 30 days to either find a new role inside the company or begin an external search. The good news was that Laurisa had a worldwide community of 400,000 colleagues in the IBM organization, any one of whom might connect her with her next job. The challenge was to reach as many of these people as possible in 30 short days. What would be the most efficient way to get the word out about her skills and background and her track record of success? In the Information Age she might have been limited to mass e-mailing or using the telephone to reach out to her network.

Fortunately for Laurisa, she was a Social Age expert and regularly contributed to social networking sites both inside and outside IBM. Laurisa quickly crafted a blog post clearly stating her situation, skills, and a link to her resume, which she posted to an internal social file-sharing site. She asked those who wanted to help her to join her LinkedIn network and perhaps even write a recommendation. Within hours of her post, IBMers from around the world had commented on the blog post with words of encouragement and job leads. Within a few days, Laurisa’s LinkedIn contacts had doubled (doubling at the same time the number of secondary connections, of which there were already several thousand).

Multiple recommendations from IBM colleagues and business partners appeared seemingly overnight on Laurisa’s LinkedIn profile. Surprisingly, some of the recommendations came from individuals Laurisa had never met face-to-face, or even directly interacted with on any level. Laurisa’s dedication to a fundamental principle of social networking—provide value to the community to receive value—paid off handsomely as she quickly landed another position at IBM.

The fastest growing demographic on the social networking site Facebook is users 25 years of age and older. Originally a college-student-only phenomenon (the site started at Harvard University in 2004), Facebook quickly became a worldwide phenomenon and now has more than 150 million users!^[5] During registration, a variety of tools enable you to easily grow your network of contacts. This feature helps business people easily stay in touch on both a professional and a personal level. People tend to go where the crowds are, and Facebook provides a tremendous advantage to reach people with similar interests and backgrounds.

Much like LinkedIn, Facebook also has a status update feature that enables you to broadcast a short message to your network when you make changes to your profile. Professionals use this feature to communicate about projects, job postings, or even business trips. It’s an effortless way to stay in contact with colleagues without having to contact each of them individually. Increasingly, there is a movement toward consolidation of social networking platforms. In this case, if you use Twitter, you can have it update your Facebook status automatically.

Facebook is also an application platform, so developers can create applications to share among friends. Fan groups—for instance fans of a product, person, or event—can also be created. One health food company created a Facebook application to motivate its customers to participate in healthy challenges, such as trying a new recipe or fitness regimen. Users can invite their friends to participate and track their results. The company promotes its healthy lifestyle philosophy and simultaneously builds product loyalty. Customers feel involved not only with the company, but also with a community of friends who share the same healthy goals.

Companies are even going so far as to create fan sites around their product, store, or brand. For example, an international retail clothing chain has a Facebook fan site where it communicates regularly with members about everything from holiday sales to new store openings. Users of the site can take a virtual tour of the store via video. Customers can even try on the latest fashions in a virtual online dressing room.

Facebook fan sites, however, aren’t just about pushing information out to customers. Facebook allows customers and company reps to exchange ideas, perhaps even discuss where to open new stores. Discussion boards on Facebook encourage customers to share their enthusiasm for upcoming fashions or make suggestions for outfits. Facebook users even upload photos of themselves shopping in the store or wearing their latest purchase.

To borrow a term used by Malcolm Gladwell in his bestselling book of the same name,^[6] it seems a “tipping point” was reached by YouTube in the midst of the 2008 U.S. presidential elections. Whether people were watching a candidate speech, tracking down a scandal, or submitting a question to a live presidential debate, it seemed the whole world was suddenly on YouTube.

YouTube allows anyone to upload and share with the world a video on virtually any topic. Have a neat card trick that you’ve already shown all your friends? Why not upload it to YouTube so the whole world can enjoy it? Do you enjoy creating music, but just haven’t been able to get the attention of a big-time record producer? A 20-something musician named Tay Zonday composed and recorded a song called Chocolate Rain that to date has been viewed 33 million times on YouTube.^[7] What music exec wouldn’t sell his or her soul for that kind of commercial play? (If you haven’t seen Chocolate Rain yet, fair warning—be prepared to have the catchy melody dancing in your head for the next week!)

In this context, it might be reasonable to ask what business value we hope to gain with YouTube. Well, first, YouTube is a common way to establish a communications channel—literally. A YouTube channel gives an individual or company a centralized location to share videos related to their brand. Access YouTube and type in the name of any large corporation to see the way this technology is exploited. For example, the Ford Channel currently has 121 videos on YouTube.^[8]

Catching a virus is usually a bad thing, whether in your sinuses or on your computer. For a video on YouTube, however, a virus is not a bad thing at all. Tay Zonday’s Chocolate Rain video quickly “went viral,” as it was passed through e-mail, blogs, and other social networking forums. With an advertising budget of $0, Zonday’s song became a worldwide hit and landed him appearances on Jimmy Kimmel Live and Good Morning America.^[9] Easy-to-use widgets allow you to quickly embed YouTube videos on your blog and even automatically update a section of the blog with the latest video from a particular artist or company, while increasing the “contagiousness” of a cool or helpful video.

In 2009, British singing phenomenon Susan Boyle enjoyed a YouTube turbo-boost similar to Tay Zonday’s when she first appeared on the television show Britain’s Got Talent. A complete unknown, and at 47 an unlikely pop star, Boyle wowed the Talent audience with her performance of I Dreamed a Dream from the play Les Miserables. Through viral distribution of the video, a worldwide YouTube audience quickly became convinced—as Talent’s judges were—that Boyle was the real thing. YouTube carries numerous versions of her performance; the number of combined views of these videos to date is approximately 100 million.

Zonday’s and Boyle’s performances are similar to thousands of other videos that currently stream on the World Wide Web. As shown in Figure 7.1, there has been a significant shift toward traffic from Social Age tools such as YouTube and Facebook.

Figure 7.1. Internet traffic’s shift from traditional portal search sites to social networking sites.^[10]

Now that we’re aware of some social tools and networking sites, let’s look at their professional value to individuals and some of the ways companies can use these tools to grow their business.

• Sharing information: Sharing information inside an enterprise can be difficult. As discussed in Chapter 4, most organizations determine what can be published and by whom. Processes control everything from initial submission to final publication. This traditional top-down approach takes time. In the Social Age, where information can literally travel around the world in minutes, companies need to adopt methods to share information just as quickly.

What’s your business challenge? Spreading the word on ways to overcome a common sales objection? Alerting a user base to a discrepancy in a technical manual? Sharing information about a competitor with your worldwide sales team? Quickly sharing any of this information saves valuable time for you and your colleagues and provides a competitive edge. E-mail won’t get the job done quickly enough, and besides, e-mails quickly drop (often unread) to the bottom of our e-mail box.

Social networking allows this information to be shared informally and efficiently. By collaborating and participating in forums, blogs, wikis, and social bookmarking, employees have an outlet to share this valuable information. Sales consultants can easily blog about overcoming a common sales objection. A techie can correct a documentation discrepancy through a product documentation wiki. A marketing rep can share information on a competitor by adding a link to the social bookmarking repository.

With social networking tools, employees can share information with the people they know, but more importantly, they can share information with people they don’t know!

• Making employees smarter: “Intelligence isn’t owned by any individual company,” said Adam Christensen, IBM social media specialist. “Grounding happens by public conversations. It requires honesty.”^[11] Companies that encourage the use of social networking tools, both inside and outside of the corporate firewalls, have employees who work smarter, and are thus increasingly well-grounded.

Ongoing virtual focus groups offer the opportunity for employees to speak honestly about their work, and they provide a forum to engage regularly with customers and business partners. Actively listening and participating in these types of conversations helps employees better understand customer needs and expectations. By knowing who their counterparts are in other companies, they can also be up-to-speed with the overall marketplace. Together, social networking can produce an increasingly smart workforce.

Two years ago, Keith Brooks, an IBM business partner and former Lotus employee, started what ultimately became one of the most popular Lotus LinkedIn groups: Lotus Software Professionals. Keith used the group to form a community of individuals interested primarily in Lotus Software technologies.

“I thought it was a good way to meet others, find a job, maybe some projects,” said Keith. “What it became was a very robust group with some of the [best-known] Lotus people, inside and outside of IBM....”^[12]

Different business professionals interested in Lotus Software use Keith’s site. Some are IBMers, some are customers, some are business partners, and others might be just fans of Lotus products. A discussion feature allows members to interact with each other on topics ranging from technical support and troubleshooting to job searches.

Keith also uses his blog to share his knowledge and experiences with potential clients. He has been chided by some who tell him he’s giving away his knowledge for free. Keith doesn’t see it that way. “The blog has brought in leads,” he said. “Clients have contacted me because they were researching a topic and found an article on my blog.”

Keith also monitors Twitter for Lotus references. He uses the search function to catch tweets of people commenting on their experiences with Lotus. Twitter’s interactive and random nature allows him to reply to these comments and a productive business conversation often ensues, which has sometimes led to client engagements.

Because of his use of LinkedIn, Twitter, and blogs, Keith has grown his network of business contacts. He now has a large, ready-made network to which he can market new offerings.

In many ways, Keith is the classic Social Age entrepreneur, leveraging all the tools, while simultaneously building valuable personal and professional relationships. “I have connected myself to over 4,000 people on LinkedIn,” Keith said with obvious satisfaction. “There are always possibilities to grow and expand the [number of] people you touch and thus can help or work with down the road.”

Regardless of which social networking tools or sites you choose to use, first identify your goals. Do you want to connect with existing customers? Grow market share? Get feedback on new products or service offerings? What do you want to do?

And what do you want to get out of your new relationships? You won’t be interacting as a faceless, monolithic corporation. You’re talking with people and building relationships. Remember what that veteran—and very successful—salesman told me: “People buy from other people.”

The social networking medium requires a fundamentally different attitude and tone than earlier unidirectional communication. No longer are companies allowed to make “pronouncements” and hope the market simply accepts what they say. The social networking community has the opportunity to react, both positively and negatively, to your message. And believe me, they will! These responses in large part can’t be controlled.

Use of Social Tools in Marketing Campaigns

Let’s look at a traditional marketing methodology and see how social networking plays a role. There are five fundamental actions you must take to effectively leverage social networking on the Internet, as illustrated in Figure 7.2:

Figure 7.2. Steps to monitor the Internet conversation to effectively leverage social networking in your marketing campaign.

• Monitor the market conversation—Listen to the market conversation for insights into your current position.

• Identify and engage—Identify and engage key influencers who are influencing the market conversation around your brand, product, or service.

• Maximize distribution—Maximize distribution and impact of key digital marketing assets.

• Empower advocacy—Build and foster brand loyalists and empower them to advocate on behalf of your brand.

• Understand the impact—Measure your tactics.

Banco Popular de Puerto Rico, the largest commercial bank in Puerto Rico, has embraced social networking to interact with its customers. They host a lively blog called Mi Banco, in which they announce new products, ask the customers about services they’d like to see in the future, and provide a basic level of customer service.^[13] What makes this blog work in a business environment? Mi Banco follows basic blogging guidelines including clear identification of authors, comment feedback from the author, and frequent posts.

Including a bio of all the bloggers on Mi Banco helps the readers know exactly who they are interacting with and what their roles are inside the company. The authors write with authentic and expert voice about the area of business they handle. This is vital to helping customers feel they are interacting with someone who is listening to their needs and who has the power to take their ideas forward and act on them.

The readers of Mi Banco are also enthusiastic with their comments. One post on the Mi Banco Web site recently received more than 500 responses! The Mi Banco blogging team makes sure every blog post is read, and authors actively monitor the comments and respond to all questions in a timely and concise manner. This, in turn, helps promote usage and readership of the blog. When customers and potential customers feel they have a voice, customer satisfaction and customer retention increases.

Mi Banco authors post regularly. Readers know the blog is a vital part of Banco Popular’s business and receives respectful attention inside of the company. Similarly, Banco Popular also has a Twitter id to promote its services and financial products.

A highly specialized team of marketing, communication, and legal specialists have traditionally taken responsibility for protecting a company’s image and reputation. Brand loyalty has always been the product of a series of carefully crafted messages written by these specialists. Consumers had no choice but to trust and believe what was said by the company, whether that was a product description, service agreement, or marketing message. Thus the proverbial advice: caveat emptor!

With social networking, however, much of the traditional brand creation and preservation model has undergone dramatic changes. In a world where people can freely interact with each other about practically every product, service, or company, they no longer need to rely on the word of the company. People have always trusted their friends and word-of-mouth much more than corporate advertising. Now, social networking has exponentially increased the number of “friends” and “mouths” we have to listen to. At the least, consumers now habitually check product reviews before buying anything online.

In spite of these benefits, some companies are still apprehensive about allowing their employees to participate in social networking. Firewall blocks are not uncommon. Concerns range from fears of lost productivity to socially inappropriate comments. Clearly, management might be concerned about employees interacting directly with the public, or identifying themselves as company employees. This is a valid concern and should be addressed with corporate social networking policies that are clearly communicated and carefully enforced. But there must be a level of trust in the people you hire if you hope to tap into the tremendous power of social networking. A refusal to join in can carry significant costs for a company. This question is perhaps best considered from each perspective.

From an employee standpoint, a company’s refusal to join the social networking movement means that employees are largely disconnected. However, humans are social; they enjoy and benefit by interacting with others. Consider that your employees have probably already formed groups on Facebook, LinkedIn, or MySpace because they share the common bond of employment by your company. What are common questions we ask when we meet someone for the first time? “What do you do for a living?” “Where do you work?” Social networking lets us answer those questions and share the common victories and challenges of our place of employment.

Employees might also sense a lack of trust from their employer if it blocks access to social networking sites such as Facebook or LinkedIn. The employee wants to think he is being judged by his performance and contribution to the company, rather than by the amount of time he spends on a social networking site.

From the company’s standpoint, when it fails to exploit social networking tools, it is probably limiting its ability to inform and engage with customers. It is also missing out on conversations currently taking place about their brand and their company. As I said, people talk about your company in cyberspace whether you like it or not. Wouldn’t you like to know what’s being said? If your product or store has a fan site on Facebook, wouldn’t it be important for someone in product management or customer relations to know first-hand what your customers think of your newest product?

By not embracing social networking, your company also faces the real risk of appearing—and actually being!—out-of-touch, irrelevant, inflexible, “last millennium,” not-with-it, and as not listening. Depending on your product or service, this combination could cause lasting harm to your business and your brand. Without social networking, you’re potentially missing out on opportunities to share your message, product, service, or brand via a powerful word-of-mouth method. After all, isn’t it an axiom that more people trust word-of-mouth than any other type of advertising?

In Chapter 8, “On the Shoulders of Giants,” we review how the social networking mind-set provides tremendous benefits in the area of software development and generates a wealth of vibrant open software communities.