Social Networking

They say it's not what you know it's who you know. That's probably why social networking is expanding beyond an application largely used by consumers to an all-encompassing phenomenon impacting sales, marketing, customer care, interactive TV and more. It's all part of the larger trend toward unified communications.

As Paul Dunay, global managing director of services and social marketing at Avaya and author of "Facebook Marketing for Dummies," noted during the Avaya-sponsored preconference to ITEXPO West in Los Angeles last month: Social networking "is a once-in-a-century communications platform."

Dunay said the importance of social networking is comparable with other world-changing developments such as the printing press and radio. That may be going a bit far, but there's no arguing against the fact that social networking has become extremely pervasive and appears poised to get its hooks into a wide variety of additional applications.

The widespread use and appeal of social networking, paired with the rich data those that enjoy social networks such as Facebook tend to freely offer up, are contributing to the likely expansion of this new kind of communication. As a presidential candidate, Barack Obama helped bring the already popular social networking trend into broad relief within the political arena. Since then we've seen more politicians, as well as businesses, working to use social networking to their advantage.

For example, Toyota recently used social media to promote its new vehicle, the iQ, according to Forrester Research, which reports that various social networking efforts drove up blog traffic by more than 200 percent and increased conversations about the product.

But, as Dunay noted, social networking can be used for more than just marketing. It has a wide array of business applications involving employee-to-employee communications; customer-to-enterprise communications; and customer-to-customer communications.

And while young people were the first to flock to social networks, more of the middle-aged and older populous (including me) is now using Facebook, Twitter and the like. According to Forrester, social networking is showing strong growth among older adults, with participation among those in the 35 to 54 age group growing 60 percent in the past year. UC