Social Networking

I believe that two of the most powerful leverages that social networking has within society today is recruitment and marketing.  Personally, I can attest to the power of recruitment through social networking because without it, I would of not been employed with the company that I am currently with.  It was through LinkedIn that the recruiter was able to find me and reach out to me asking if I was interested in an opening they had. Shally Steckerl in Frank Langfitt's article, Social Networking Technology Boosts Job Recruiting, puts into perspective how recruitment opportunities have evolved through our time with this explanation - "With my Rolodex, I had to call any one of these thousand people and say, 'Hey, Bob. I'm looking for someone that does this, or I'm looking for someone in this industry, or I'm looking for a job, who do you know? With social networking, I don't need to go to Bob directly to find out who Bob's friends are. Or Bob's friends' friends. So, effectively, I have a thousand contacts that could potentially lead me to 100,000, now I have 8,500 contacts that could potentially lead me to 4.5 million." Job seekers now have extra leverage by posting their resume on a social networking site like LinkedIn, it increases the exposure of their talent and aids in the hiring process. Before any of this existed, applicants had to actively send out and contact a multitude of people to even be considered. Now there are an abundance of channels for both parties to go through. 

On the marketing aspect, Twitter as described in Claire Cain Miller's article, Facebook is Going for Some Twitter Sensibility, is "a tool for people to peer into the collective mind and see what people are talking about in real time. It is also a tool for businesses to reach customers and monitor what their customers are saying about them." This evolution in social communication between a business and its consumers is a breakthrough in marketing. Now more than ever, businesses are able to directly speak to their core customers and evaluate all types of feedback at the same time. This opens up a tremendous amount of opportunities in the researching of improvement aspects to any company; information that years ago would've cost a fortune to obtain.

On the contrary, there are obviously some negative results of all this change for businesses. Take for example, that a group of individuals had a bad experience somehow with your brand. This could go viral and within hours or days can spread from just one group, to thousands or millions of people. As a business you have to prepare to attack and remedy any situation like this that may potentially tarnish your brand.

From this, these social networking sites essentially provides the consumers with more buying power. In the future, from this instant form of communication and growing network of social media users, I wouldn't be surprised if marketing strategies within bigger corporations are to be primarily determined by the voices of the main influencers of the brand.