July 11th, 2006

Social Networks Changing the World?

I’ve read about, heard from colleagues, and experimented with social networks. Chances are you probably have, too. But what do they mean for your business, and will they really change the world as a Fast Company author recently pondered?

While I haven’t had as much time, personally, to experiment with social networking as I’d like, just this morning, I got an inquiry from a PR agency head from my LinkedIn network. She asked me for time to discuss her agency’s formation of an advisory board for a new program that would match the best employment candidates with the best (i.e. socially responsible) companies. Certainly a good fit for us and, after reviewing her impressive background and website, I invited her to call.

We were also recently approached by a social network, whose management we now consider friends, that focuses on changing the world for the better. Zaadz is off to a good start, with many thousands of members in its beta mode already and some great partners.

But our experiences pale in comparison to the examples of social networks described in the recent Fast Company article I referenced above. Read it if you have any interest in one of the most apparently powerful online phenomenons developing right now.

As the article points out, examples of the power of social networking are reflected in the 40,000 mainly Latino high schoolers in Los Angeles who played hooky one day in March to protest the Senate’s proposed bill to crack down on illegal immigration. It was believed to be the largest such demonstration in L.A.’s history. In April, relatively unknown Sandi Thom had just finished 21 straight nights of live performances–Webcast from her basement. By the end, Thom was pulling in a nightly audience of 100,000 listeners. In both cases, the audience was drawn together, at least in part, by word of mouth on social-networking sites.

“Personal connections–forged through words, pictures, video, and audio posted just for the hell of it–are the life of the new Web, bringing together the estimated 60 million bloggers, 72 million MySpace users, and millions more on single-use social networks where people share one category of stuff, like Flickr (photos), Del.icio.us (links), Digg (news stories), Wikipedia (encyclopedia articles), and YouTube (video),” cites Anya Kamenetz in her article.

Anya adds:

“… it’s hard to overstate the coming impact of these new network technologies on business: They hatch trends and build immense waves of interest in specific products. They serve giant, targeted audiences to advertisers. They edge out old media with the loving labor of amateurs. They effortlessly provide hyperdetailed data to marketers. If your customers are satisfied, networks can help build fanatical loyalty; if not, they’ll amplify every complaint until you do something about it. They are fund-raising platforms. They unify activists of every stripe, transforming an atomized mass of individuals with few resources into an international movement able to put multinational corporations and governments on the defensive. (Those immigration protests played no small part in stymieing Senate action over immigration.) They provide an authentic, peer-to-peer channel of communication that is far more credible than any corporate flackery. And all this after only four years or so in development. On the day you read this, a quarter of a million more people will jump onto MySpace, each with her own particular purpose in mind.”

Posted by perry
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