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Wednesday, January 12, 2011

Social Networking and Its Impact to your Business

Social networking offers great potential for business improvement. This
online activity that depends on social networking sites like Facebook,
Twitter, Multiply, and Friendster among others, offers several business
advantages. Research suggests that social networking encourages knowledge
sharing, fuels innovation and can possibly boost productivity.

At present, almost every company now uses social networking technologies.
A very recent survey revealed that most companies now utilize social
networking not only as a strategy to further advance their business
interest but also to serve other purposes. Take for instance the case of
many outsourcing SEO services providers scattered across the world. These
outsourced services providers turn to social networking as a means to
communicate with both employees and clients. Social networking sites are
now used to collaborate with different stakeholders using instant
messaging features and other sorts of technology-facilitated social
networking.

However, unfettered social networking especially employees can also lead
to a concomitant of risks. It can possibly send the wrong kind of messages
to the world. Haphazard social networking may also result to confusion
among existing customers and can possibly compromise a company’s brand.

Irresponsible use of social networking technologies can possibly lead to
leaks of confidential information, damage to the company’s reputation, and
decline of employee productivity.

Another study disclosed that social networking brews up several other
risks like security of contents uploaded on social networking sites,
proliferation of many other new social networking sites, and monitoring of
contents uploaded by each member. There is also the threat of uneven and
inaccurate spread of information across many other sites. Not to mention
the fact that social networking sites allow individuals to ask and
generate job recommendations that later end up mistakenly perceived as
endorsements by an organization.


Large scale companies, in particular, tend to experience the downsides of
social networking, Given the fact that large companies need more
technologies, they become targets of competitors trying to glean into
their trade secrets. Many believe that this is primarily because social
networking sites used by many large scale companies feature more people
who can be tapped for greater productivity and better business economics.

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