social networking craze..!!

Facebooking, twittering and blogging, these are common phrases in our everyday lives.  Most of the students in our business course are a member of some social networking site, granted some are clearly more obsessed with spending hours and hours a week staring at their computer screen than others.! Nevertheless, these sites have become a part of our daily routine.

Different social networking sites offer users various features which is why we all have our opinion as to which is the best and can sometimes lead to a lengthy debate.  Blogging is for the person with something to say and wants somewhere to say it, it is like an online diary, obviously as it is online the PG diary stuff goes in and not "pouring your heart out" stuff.!! Typical entries i have seen so far are opinions on various people, products and services that mean anything to the author. Facebook and Bebo are for the people who want to connect with others.  They involve a list of all friends and sometimes people you just met once and they ask "are you on Facebook/Bebo??", and the following day you have a friend request.  These sites are used quite often for tagging and sharing photos and writing messages to people or even having an instant chat with online friends.

All of the social media that is so widely used is relatively new, only growing so much in the past few years.  So far people are aware of the benefit for keeping in touch and communicating on a personal level.  However, the use of these sites for a business is gaining more and more interest recently and there are a number of articles being published with benefits, tips and success stories of having your business on these sites.  I for one think that the potential of these sites to reach an interested audience is massive as long as you are clever and know which sites to include your business on, what audience you are targeting and what tone to use when using these sites.

All of this and more was covered when an expert blogger and social networker came to give a talk at our management information systems class in college.His name was Damien Mulley and he successfully runs a communications company in Cork.  I am not entirely sure what others expectations were for this talk if they had any at all but for me the talk exceeded my  expectations.  The hour flew as the talk was relevant and interesting.  It was on a topic that we can all relate to and was delivered in a casual straightforward way.  It helped to relate the theory involved in this subject to real life examples and how it's being used in the business world that we are soon going to enter.  I think the fact that Damien Mulley spends every day blogging and seeing the feedback these sites can create he can appreciate the phenomenon that widespread access to the internet for the general public has created.  So there is no better person to communicate the uses of social media to anyone who wants to listen.