According to the latest study on social networking from digital metrics specialist ComScore, social websites have grown by leaps and bounds during the last year. MySpace attracted more than 114 million visitors in June 2007, up 72% on the previous year, while Facebook saw 52.2 million, which equates to a staggering 270% rise. These impressive statistics bolster the argument that social networking is no passing Web 2.0 fad, but an online activity that is here to stay. But what exactly is social networking?

Social networking defined
It’s one of those piece of string questions, with the answer varying depending on who you are talking to and what they expect to get out of it. But whether it is a business or personal site, every social network requires the same basics to qualify as such: user profiles, content and a method of allowing users to connect with each other.

The internet has always offered these things, independently of each other, arguably starting with Usenet discussion groups some 20 years ago. In 1995 the self-explanatory Classmates.com was probably the first web-based social networking site, followed in 1997 by SixDegrees.com, which started using the friend of a friend principle to good effect.

But it wasn’t really until 2002, when technology started to catch up with desire, that Friendster appeared and changed everything by giving users (rather than the computer-managed environment) control over who they connected with.
Certainly, it was the arrival of Web 2.0 content-driven services (where content is both created and shared by its users) that enabled social networking sites as we know them today to prosper.

It is easy to fall into the trap of thinking that social networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace are nothing more than glorified blogs, but that would be missing the point.

Yes, most such services provide a web-based outlet for publishing opinion, but it’s the ease with which this content can be shared among a network of friends, and the ease with which discovery tools allow that network to be expanded, that really make social networking the phenomenon it is today.

The true power of social networking sites lies in the ability both to make connections and to exploit the potential of the knowledge pool created. This potential is perhaps best exposed when you move out of the realm of the best-known consumer sites and into the realm of social networking for business.
Although this sounds like something of a misnomer, it actually works remarkably well in principle. Combining the friends discovery capability of consumer sites with the “six degrees of separation” concept to build up a business network is a great way of expanding your business connections with the minimum of effort.

Here’s how it works. You sign up, the system automatically scans your email address book for people you know who are already members, and you invite them to connect to your network of contacts. It also gives you limited access to the networks of each of these people, who you can also invite to join your network, and so on. The ability to tap into the friends of your friends, and the business contacts of your business contacts, opens up new relationship opportunities that just would not be possible in anything other than this web-based environment.
So how do you go about actually building a network of connections at one of these sites from scratch?

Thankfully you don’t have to hang around like a wallflower at the office party waiting for someone to ask you to dance. Instead, most services will have a tool which offers to compare your email address book (web-based services are the most popular with the personal social networks, while the business-oriented ones tend to opt for Outlook contacts) with its own list of members.

Hook up
You can then automatically send an invitation ­ there’s usually the option to customise it and make it a little less impersonal ­ for them to hook up and connect with your network. The more proactive of services will also give you the option of sending an email to those people not already members, asking them if they want to join you and including a direct link to the membership application page.
Alternatively, you can browse the membership lists of the network you have joined. This can be accomplished in many different ways, from a precise search on names (not that successful if you are looking for an Ian Jones, for example) to email addresses. Some let you search by “network”, which could include a company you worked for or a university you attended.

One thing that applies equally to all social networking services is that once you have added a contact or two, things take off exponentially. Immediately, you have access to the contacts of your contacts, and personal experience suggests that it really is quite common to discover that you share friends and colleagues. The logical next step is to invite them to connect with you, and so the cycle continues.

But what’s it all for?
Services such as LinkedIn are an increasingly popular route to finding staff who would simply not be on a company’s radar otherwise. Indeed, the people who get approached by someone in a once or twice removed network are often not even actively looking for a career change.

Startups are able to use the informal handshake of a social networking environment to break the ice and introduce the possibility of working together. This is helped by the ability to flag up whether you are “interested in hearing about new opportunities” within your personal profile on the site.

There is no doubt that the sense of belonging to a networked community means that even if someone is not interested in a prospective job, they are likely to be much more polite about turning you down than if they are approached by a recruitment agent who has found them via a Google search. Social networks allow a degree of intimacy that moves relationships up a notch from being total strangers ­ even if they are just that.

But it would be quite wrong to think of social networking purely in terms of a recruitment playground at one extreme and just a playground at the other. Dig underneath all the hype and what you actually have here is an entirely new approach to knowledge exchange.

The wisdom of crowds is perhaps best exemplified by Wikipedia, where entries can be edited by anyone. Over time ­ and given the number of people who will see those entries ­ errors are more likely to be removed than to remain.

Social networks allow anyone in a network to tap into the wisdom of crowds, discovering and accessing information from a friend of a friend ­ and their friends too for that matter. Providing the tools not only to manage personal networks, but to extend and leverage them too, is at the heart of the success of any social networking service. The information professional will quickly appreciate that, within the domain of people-centric information at any rate, these networks complement their own skills in the discovery and organisation as well as application of data.
Commercial companies are starting to use bespoke social networking concepts within their own communication strategies and services to boost the value of their interactions with customers and business partners alike. But it is the world of academia that social networking has really made inroads. Indeed, it was here that the current media darling of the genre, Facebook, was conceived and remained exclusively until just a few months ago when it opened its doors to anyone who wanted to interact.

As well as the obvious community bonding and relationship building advantages of such a service to the student body and staff alike, social networking is also proving a useful tool for the admissions department when it comes to student background research. Using networks popular with teenagers, along with the standard act of Googling, it is possible to build a reasonably detailed profile of the candidate’s “real” persona rather than the one carefully displayed at the interview.

Which brings us nicely to another of the potential pitfalls of social networking: it exposes the real you to the world. Just as you should never say something in an email that you wouldn’t be happy shouting to the world at large, so the same applies with what you say within the boundaries of a social network.

Info pros know only too well how discoverability is no longer a dark art, yet it remains easy to forget this when caught up in what appears to be a cosy chat between friends.

Don’t be put off by the media scare stories of predators stalking social networking sites for vulnerable youngsters to groom or building information profiles to use in identity theft scams, or that it is just a monumental waste of teenage time. As usual, the mainstream media look for the tabloid headline and tend to ignore the underlying good.

In the case of social networking that underlying good cannot be overstated. It is one of the most efficient ways you can connect with like-minded people online, and build a network of contacts that you would never normally be able to reach by any other method.