OVERLY SOCIAL? MAKING SENSE OF THE MADNESS

Social Networking has been and continues to be all the rage. But for someone who is coming late to the party, the whole web 2.0 landscape can be pretty confusing and intimidating. I imagine that it is a full time job just keeping up with everything new. Never mind about catching up on the already well-loved tools.

However, I do want to share two things with those fellow resisters out there.

First is the a Business Week article by Auren Hoffman, The Social Media Gender Gap, where Hoffman discusses how women are outpacing men in the use of social media tools. Although initially surprising, the rational seems to make sense.

Hoffman writes, "Women's behavior online, on the other hand, is less transactional and more relationship-driven. They spend more time on social networks building relationships, communicating with friends, and making new friends. Married women use social networks to share pictures and treat their network profiles as family home pages to share with friends and relatives. And because they use social networks to be social, a dollar spent marketing to acquire a female user goes a lot further than on a male user.".

This seems especially important given that many of us (women business owners, at In good Company in particular) have businesses whose target market is women.

Seems like it is time to get on the bandwagon! But, how?

Enter my second resource, a book called Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies, by Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff, and recommended to me by IGC Member Frances Spark of Spark Consulting.

Authors Li and Bernoff use Groundswell to decipher and describe various social media tools and link them to business goals and outcomes. Thank Goodness. Fears about stumbling around in cyber space are assuaged and time can be can be spent productively.

I imagine the key to success is to focus on a few tools that meet your business goals and to use them well rather then open an account on everything available. Hopefully Groundswell can help me pick the right ones....ah, more homework.

shared by Adelaide