The word “networking” usually evokes those awkward moments at conferences when you’re standing alone in the crowd, sipping a coffee and wondering when to leave.
That awkwardness comes from not having any known basis for politely introducing yourself. Even a single item of information about another person can be enough to show that you are interdependent and thus two nodes in a social network, rather than merely attendees at the same event. Sometimes the only way to figure that out is to sidle up to a stranger and begin speaking. Tough if you aren’t in the mood.
The joy of the internet is that it enables you to discover these interdependencies without the restrictions of time, venue or direct human intervention. Social network services like Facebook.com, MySpace.com and Bebo.com provide a collection of various ways for users to interact, such as chat, messaging, email, video, voice chat, file sharing, blogging and discussion groups. Joining your colleagues in a community that is using these features enables you to communicate with the right people about what’s important to you. That’s why these social network services are some of the most visited sites in the UK.
Facebook broke into the comScore.com Top Ten ranking for the UK in December 2007 with over 12 million UK unique visitors; when I joined Facebook last June it had about 3 million. Key to that explosive growth was Facebook’s decision in May 2007 to enable third parties to implement and share their own software applications on Facebook.com. Suddenly, software developers had an opportunity to market their applications to millions of reasonably sophisticated users of the same technology platform, who were there for the specific purpose of sharing information with each other. In effect, the cost of starting an internet business had plummeted and become “democratised”, giving rise to what has been dubbed “the Facebook economy”. Not to be outdone, Google soon announced its own “Open Social” programme to enable the deployment of social software applications across most of the other social network services – except Facebook, of course.
Figures from Appsoholic, a Facebook application that tracks users’ activity, indicate what the “average” person on Facebook is up to: on 8 February, the most active applications were those for rating self and friends, sending roses and chocolates etc. I have done none of these things, but there are thousands of niches covered by the Facebook community.
I belatedly joined Facebook in June 2007 because it was the most mentioned business name at the Society for Computers and Law’s Annual Conference. It was already more alluring than MySpace and Bebo, having sprung out of Harvard with a largely graduate, rather than teen, membership. But its speed of growth, challenge to privacy, the alarming prevalence of user-generated content and its new role as a launch-pad for businesses finally drew me in
I had also resisted joining partly because I was already participating in LinkedIn.com, the networking service for business people. LinkedIn has only just passed the 1 million user mark in the UK, but is the most popular business network. It acts as a repository for your curriculum vitae, or “profile”, which is displayed to people whom you invite, or who invite you, to “connect”. You can also make some elements of your profile public. I find it is useful for arranging introductions to suppliers or clients, or learning about people whom you are scheduled to meet or call. There is some “news” flow about who is connecting with people in your immediate network, who has updated their profile and you can ask and answer questions.
But there is a place for both services. While the LinkedIn experience is appropriately static, sober and formal, Facebook is designed to facilitate very informal interaction amongst connected “friends” through various forms of messaging, one-line “status updates”, writing on each other’s profiles or “walls”, playing games and arranging events. You see all your “friends’” activity summarised as a series of one-liners on a “News Feed” on your “homepage”. In fact, most exchanges between friends on Facebook are brief and informal – often irreverent and funny. While you might meet the same people with whom you are connected on LinkedIn, meeting them on Facebook is the equivalent of joining them in a bar after work.
While I have a fairly full CV on my LinkedIn profile, the personal information that I share on Facebook is limited to current job title and my taste in music, film and books. The remaining “colour” comes from the applications that I add to my profile, groups I join, my blog (which is visible to those who’ve added the “Blog Friends” application), and my comments or discussion on various group pages, eg the Society for Computers and Law, the Financial Services Club. My 70 “friends” on Facebook are a subset of the 230 connections on LinkedIn.
I tend to check Facebook and LinkedIn once a day, spending just a few minutes responding to requests to connect, seeing who is doing what. I have started groups on both platforms – one for Zopa on LinkedIn, where people start groups to enable people to simply state an affiliation; the other for the Society for Computers and Law on Facebook, which lends itself better to discussions or arranging events (though SCL members have not proved terribly active!).
No doubt there are employees who spend hours on Facebook, in the same way that bored staff used to play patience on their computers. But that is not a signal to block access to Facebook on an enterprise basis, as many IT directors would insist upon: it’s a signal that the staff in question don’t have enough to do, or are poorly managed. In any event, no one interested in their own future or that of their business should feel comfortable blocking access to a site visited by over 12 million Britons a month.
Simon Deane-Johns is a consultant lawyer with Amazon, the world’s biggest online retailer, and a co-founder of Zopa, the online marketplace where people lend and borrow directly with each other.
Email sdeane-johns@axiomlegal.net.
