I’ve been considering writing an outline of some of the more popular social networking sites and tools for a while now and this weekend I’ve created a first draft which I intend to add to as time goes on.

With any business strategy, start first with the “Why?” and set some SMART goals to work towards, then work out which resource helps you to achieve it… hopefully start here, will help with the second part of that.

In part this page was also a follow up to last weeks presentation at the Poole Business Women’s Lunch Club where I felt I hadn’t covered all of the ground as thouroughly as I would of liked in the time given.

All thoughts, comment and feedback welcome.

Tags: strategy

The power of collective action has been taken to a whole new level via the Web. 

Crowdsourcing refers formally to the act of recruiting and calling to action a number of individuals in order to solve a central problem or perform individual tasks as part of a larger project.  This can be as part of a charitable or otherwise non commercial goal, such as the many user contributed and edited articles which make up Wikipedia, or on a commercial basis- for example Amazon’s ‘Human Turk’ freelancer operation, where businesses offer out ongoing and often repetitive work on a per action basis. 

The term Crowdsourcing can also be used as a consumer demand term; for example Threadless, the online t-shirt retailer, releases new designs to be purchased only when enough members of its community have voted for, and paid for that design.  Either way, it seems clear that one common element of sucessful Crowdsourcing is the community and social element; commercial considerations give way to a feeling of working with others towards a single goal.

In business, you could do well to understand that not everyone is driven by profit- recognition and the feeling of having contributed to a sucessful project are often just as important to many people.  Perhaps if you have a problem then why not ask your customers to help en masse?

Tags: crowdsourcing

If you bookmark a page in your internet browser that you find interesting, you can only access that when you use the same machine – social bookmarking sites allow you to share that bookmark online and access it from anywhere. 

Sites such as digg enable users to submit and rate stories, thereby ranking them for display on the digg homepage as well – as a user of the site, you’ll also get stories suggested to you based on the stories you have “dugg” – in effect providing you with a personalised news feed tailored to your interests.

wikipedia entry

Tags: social bookmarking

Social Networking is the term for sites who allow users to connect with their friends.

Each user has a page, with information about themselves that they can customise. When you find a friend, colleague or associate on the same site (at first you will often only see a basic summary of their detaisl) you can request to “add” them as a friend, once they accept you can see their full details.

The current leaders in the social networking field are facebook and myspace – largely similar in the way they allow users to share photos and video, leave messages and interact through online games and applications.

More importantly, sites like plaxo and LinkedIn are good business equivalants to these sites, allowing business people to connect and network on a global scale – they are largely still reffered to as “Social Networking” as the method they use is very similar.

LinkedIn allows you to make reccomendations that are visible on someones page and to see who they are connected to, to facilitate an introduction.

Please note – we will be frequently expanding this article as the technology grows.

Tags: social networking