Smart Social Networking For Your Small Business by Frederic Paul

Be fair, attentive, and customers
will return.

Next to mobility and cloud computing,
social networking was the talk of
Interop this year--especially at a
conference session devoted to social
software tools and a portion of the
Unconference, where real SMB users
talked about how to make the most of it.

But perhaps the best thing I learned
about social media came in a meeting
with security vendor ESET. Just as at
a recent Intuit ( INTU - news - people )
town hall where I discovered Social
NOT-working, at Interop, ESET director
of marketing Liz Fraumann shared the
abbreviation for Social Media as "So
Me." Perfect, isn't it?

Anyway, Social Software Tools: A
Critical Evaluation offered useful
insight into the choices SMBs need
to make when moving into social
networking. Tony Byrne, founder of
CMS Watch, started with a useful
breakdown of the complex world of
social networking, beginning with
separating external and internal
applications, depending on whether
the connections occur inside or
outside your company:

External

--Branded community

--Tech support

--Reader interaction

--Partner collaboration

--Professional networking

--Hosted user blogs and blog
comments (you host, but don't
control, user postings)

Internal

--Project collaboration

--Enterprise collaboration

--Enterprise discussion
(especially useful after
a merger or acquisition)

--Information organization/
filtering

--Knowledgebase management
(collaboration)

--Communities of practice

--Enterprise networking (intranets
and/or Facebook groups for
employees); vendors include
Ning and Lithium

Of course, where social networking
takes place is only the first part of
the puzzle. The networking itself
can take many forms:

Social Networking Functions

--Blogs; vendors include Six Apart,
Google's ( GOOG - news - people )
Blogger and Automattic's WordPress

--Microblogs (Twitter)

--Wikis; vendors include MediaWiki
(the foundation of Wikipedia), Atlassian,
MindTouch and Socialtext)

--Project tracking/participation software

--Multimedia (video/audio, internal or
external, including YouTube)

--Information ranking/filtering--voting

--Discussion forums

--Presence/instant messaging (IM)

--Public social networks, including
Facebook, LinkedIn, Xing and MySpace

Each of these functional applications
has its own uses, strengths and
weaknesses.

Source: http://www.forbes.com/2009/06/05/social-networking-interop-entrepreneurs-technology-bmighty.html