With the Internet now integrated into nearly all aspects of everyday business use, many business owners are recognizing the important role that social networking can play in the world of entrepreneurship.

Importance of Social Networking

Social networking can help a business gain contacts, clients, and increased public awareness. Even entrepreneurs who run small businesses from their homes can take advantage of this resource to set up a global presence. To make the most of social networking, it’s important to fully understand the concept of social networking and how it can be applied in ways that will help you grow your business.

How it Works?

Even before the Internet, social networking existed. In a nutshell, social networking is when a person uses already existing contacts to meet new people as potential social or business links. Such links, in turn, will help expand future connections. Small and local businesses can even do this simply by attending community events or participating in trade shows.

Based on the idea that any two people can be connected through a chain of five or less intermediaries, social networking can occur through social network sites and communities that may not have formed before the Internet. Through these sites, people join, and then invite their established contacts to do the same. Those contacts will likewise invite other individuals. Social networking sites are created to assist in online networking. These sites are generally communities created to support a common theme. Since the creation of social networking sites are given opportunities to meet new people and friends in their own community and across the world.

Businesses can follow this trend. Social Networking websites encourages smaller and medium-sized businesses to set up an online storefront as a way to advertise and promote business activities. By doing so, individuals can become “friends” or “fans” of the profile, and will be updated on current events, specials, and other essential information the business would like to share.

Does it Work?

It can work as long as you treat online social networking just as you would if you were doing it in person. Be an active member of a community or site. That being said, it is only as valuable as the amount of effort you want to put into it. Just like meeting face-to-face, a first impression is a lasting one. Remember to create a page that reflects the atmosphere of your business.

The Top 10 Social Networking sites as per some current research

1. Orkut
2. Facebook
3. Myspace
4. linkedin
5. Twitter
6. Xing
7. Ecademy
8. 123People
9. Pipl
10. Plaxo

No, we are not talking about any latest block buster flick or characters from the best selling science fiction. We are talking about ‘floating’ ads or hot air balloon designs.

Branding has just got bigger! Giving the term ‘Eye catching’ advertising an all new meaning! Uniquely shaped and vibrantly coloured, these flying works of art often carry brand name, logo or mascot recreated in larger-than-life scale with highly accurate detailing and precision. An excellent way to ensure your brand is not missed by any customer!

Hot air balloon advertising is perhaps the most effective marketing method when you want to create hype around your brand or ensure word of mouth publicity. After all, how many people
can ignore the sight of an eight story tall balloon?!

HOT in search:

• Google trends (updates throughout the day)
• Yahoo buzz (reflects daily buzz score)
• Top Ask.com searches: (gives weekly data for most searched 
   keywords at Ask.com)
• Aol.com hot searches
• Daily MSN A-list

HOT around social media:

• Delicious hot tags
• StumbleUpon popular tags (recently popular and all the time)
• Popular Flickr tags (in the last 24 hours, over last week and overall)
• Twitter hot topics (Twitscoop – lists most popular terms discussed at Twitter)

HOT in blogosphere:

• Technorati Popular: top blogs (in the last 2 days)
   
HOT in eCommerce?

• Amazon tag cloud (which tags Amazon customers use to classify products)
• EBay pulse (popular eBay searches)

To say this, these results have been compiled using a new tool called Google Insights for Search, which analyzes a portion of worldwide Google web searches from all Google domains to compute how many searches have been done for the terms you’ve entered.

Important Features:

1. LinkedIn is an online network of more than 25 million experienced professionals from around the world.

2. Representing 150 industries and your network consists of your connections, your connections’ connection.

3. Find potential clients, service providers, subject experts, and partners who come recommended.

4. Discover inside connections that can help you land jobs and close deals.

5. Get introduced to other professionals through the people you know.

Internet being more of interactive medium, it’s become the first choice for the advertisers to glue in their target audience and communicate the message to them effectively. Of late, internet advertising has seen a humongous growth in advertising, advertisers spent around Rs 234 crores on internet in 2006-07 (Source: IAMAI)

Let’s see how they can benefit to your current marketing efforts:

It grew on the strength of several Google-owned entities, including Google Search (up 38 percent to 17.1 million visitors), social networking site Orkut (up 39 percent to 9.3 million visitors), blog platform Blogger.com (up 102 percent to 7.3 million visitors), and video site YouTube (up 131 percent to 6.3 million visitors).

The top 3 slots go to Google, Yahoo and Microsoft respectively. Rediff comes at respectable 4th place with a rise of nearly 19% over last year. The surprise inclusion was of AOL sites at 5th spot, which were not even present a year back. The AOL mail seemed to have been quite a hit with Indian audience and numbers of them are adopting AOL mail over Yahoo and Gmail. 

Expect to make mistakes. First, any active social marketer can expect to make mistakes which cost sleep, cause angst and alienate others—it’s the reality of the game. Subscribe to the theory that “nothing ventured is nothing gained” and forgive yourself in advance for inevitable screw-ups. Social media is just that: social.

Humans tend to be unpredictable, especially in groups. Anyone who dives into social media without accepting that the results will be a mixed-bag-learning-curve risks being prematurely discouraged at inevitable rejection. Hell, several record companies said “no” to Elvis. Not everyone is going to love you.

Do not lose your cool (or, stupid is as stupid does). This can’t be stressed enough. No matter what the appropriate PR crises response turns out to be, there is seldom equity in hasty emotional comebacks. It rarely works to respond during the heat of anger, so get a grip. When rejected, it’s normal to feel hurt, anger, sadness and even rage. Count to 350, wait until tomorrow, eat some comfort food, or find another way to chill out.

It’s true that some disasters require an immediate online response, but these instances are truly rare. There’s nearly always 5 minutes or 2 hours available to wait without impacting the ultimate outcome. Pay attention to emotional red flags and be the most mature party at the table.

Don’t anger the natives. Preempt debacles by holistically participating wherever online networking takes you. Many—OK, most—passionate social community members either dislike or downright hate marketers. Their concerns are valid in many cases because average-to-bad SMO wanna-be media marketing moguls seriously abuse the privileges of membership. Be a responsible social media marketer.

Reckless or selfish SMOs dilute the neighborhood content stream, wrecking it for everybody. This common phenomenon particularly irks long term tagging and bookmarking site users. Be cognizant of the norms. Give exponentially more than you take. Respect the indigenous cultural and join in to preserve what’s best about the community. Give a hoot—don’t content pollute. Never spam.

Cast your ego aside. A savvy lawyer gave me incredibly useful advice at my wedding. He said, “When my wife and I disagree, I tell her that she ‘might’ be right.” He pointed out that responding with a non-binding statement ceding to the other’s perspective really gives nothing away at all except respect. Success and peace is what matters, not who’s right.

When you are attacked in social media and every fiber in your body wants to throttle someone because they’re so totally wrong, check your ego and take a breath. It doesn’t matter if your side “wins” if the flamers have already burnt your reputation down. It’s rather difficult to unring a bell.

Pre-plan to deal with crisis & opportunity. Ideally, it’s best to have a contingency plan in place for when things hit the fan. We teach clients to create a designated PR council, of which we’re a member. Depending on the size of your organization, this could be as basic as running the situation by your spouse or as complex as assembling the board of directors. Regardless of what’s appropriate in your situation, think ahead and have your resources lined up and ready to go.

• Networking – The main problem with social media is that everyone wants to speak and no one wants to listen. The best way to network with people on twitter is Listen, Participate, Contribute and Evaluate. This is a constant process which you need to follow and when carefully done you will enjoy the juicy fruits.

• Branding – Social media is changing the branding exercise. Now bloggers know the brands by the people who work for them. Mere brand name does not always work. If you search for brands in twitter the most common thing that you will notice is brands are following more number of people than people following them. While if you search for the person of that similar brand there are more chances of getting vice versa result. In case you are wondering why the answer is they are not following the golden rules of Listen, Participate, Contribute and Evaluate.

• Research Tool – Whenever you have a doubt tweet about it. And very soon your followers answer to it. This also helps for research too.

• News that you use –Many of the big bloggers get their story from twitter. Besides this many news breaking on blogosphere is said to be from twitter.

• Traffic – This is one of the most common answers that you get from people when you ask them why are they on a social networking site or why do they tweet. At first there are very bright chances of you to get a decent traffic. But then again you should never forget that mere tweeting links will make your image as a spammer and not a real time networker. One must follow the golden rules as it will help him to understand the current trend, what people are looking for and much more.

Happy twitting!!!