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Did You Know IM Is A Skill Employers Are Seeking
Now?
From Business Risk To
Boom
It may have once been considered very risky to have
a social networking account where your employer might someday spot something you said that he/she didn't
agree with. The next step, at that point, was the unemployment line. Although you still have to have some
judgment about what you write online, many employers have come to see social networking as a new boom area
where their employees can also serve as an unofficial marketing force to generate good will, sales exposure,
and better profits. What has caused this massive shift in perception where online social networking is
becoming an important strategy for the new business world?
The Impact of the Internet on
Advertising
Mainly, it's been the creation of the Internet as a
major news, media, and information resource for the average consumer that has changed how companies view
social networking. In the past, big companies devoted massive amounts of money to advertising spots on
television, radio, and in print to get the type of exposure that is now easily available to any new
entrepreneur in the marketplace via the Internet. Meanwhile, the influence of television, newspapers, and the
radio has decreased in proportion to the same amount the Internet has taken on the same role. As marketplaces
become more global, it's important that companies have an online presence, and this is working for them to
bring in new customers just as television, print, and radio used to do before.
The original wave of online business activity
focused most of this activity on creating websites that attracted traffic via major search engines. This was
a centralized approach, much like a company publishing its own newspaper for others to read. Companies had
complete control over what went on at their websites, and they continued to do business in a centralized
fashion until other types of sites wrestled the harness from their hands.
The Internet made it so easy for consumers to
connect with each other and to tell each other what the real scoop was on different products and services
that soon people were logging more often into places that rated everything from trip ticket services to
apartment complexes. By going to a third-party membership site, consumers who already bought these products
or services could relay the experience of ownership to others without the potential customer needing to rely
on a selling entity to tell him/her about the product. This brought about a huge democratization of
information related to price, quality, and ownership experience that was previously impossible to determine
for the average consumer, and it definitely influenced his/her buying behavior.
Now, companies were faced with the unenviable task
of trying to control information on other sites that might talk about their products or services in an
attempt to influence public opinion in a positive fashion. Only recently have companies begun to take the
force of public media on the Internet seriously, as it impacts their bottom lines. Yet, they clearly have no
control over what people post on other sites, and rather than suing people left and right for libel or
slander (which brings a backlash of negative publicity on the business and highlights the particular issue
that they may want hidden), they began to see that if the same group behavior is nurtured in positive
fashions, it can actually lead to more business from online word of mouth. That's where social networking
comes in.
Online Word of
Mouth
When you want to find a good mechanic or the best
laptop computer for your soon-to-be college student, what do you do? If you are like most people, you might
decide to ask your friends and/or relatives where you might find the product or service you need at a good
price. Why do we do things like that? It's simple. As a customer, you want to go somewhere that you trust.
The catch-22 is that if you haven't had the need to buy a laptop computer before or haven’t been lucky enough
to find a mechanic who you trust, you won't know who to go to that you can trust. That's why we ask other
people who they trust. We trust our friends and relatives because we already know these people. The next best
option is someone who is completely objective and who has nothing to gain or lose from recommending a
business they've already used and can vouch for to be trustworthy. That, obviously, will not be the said
business in question. We know that if we go to a salesperson for a particular business, his/her job is to
sell us on some product or service, whether it's what we need or not. That's his/her job, and for that
reason, he’s/she’s typically not trusted to give one a trustworthy recommendation.
This is what people were doing by going to online
sites, where people graded everything from apartments to computers. They were trying to get some idea of how
trustworthy the product, service, and business were before they laid out their hard-earned money. More and
more social networking groups began to appear for user-generated ratings and comments on everything from Web
content to mainstream media stories from around the Internet too. For example, Digg.com is a news site that allows users to rate their favorite
stories, and those with the most “thumbs ups” get front-page coverage on the site.
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