Putting Public Social Networks To Work For Business
Companies are exploiting public social networking sites for valid business purposes. However, a lack of enterprise-class controls makes management of users akin to herding cats. By adopting strong policies for business use of public social networks, small and midsize businesses can maximize value and safeguard against inappropriate connections between personal and business contacts.
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External public social networking services, such as Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, and Friendster, can be valuable sales, marketing, and support tools. These services comprise extensive networks of users who are self-organized into groups and communities. Users establish connections directly with other users to form a personal friends network. Users also join groups and communities that are organized around attributes such as products, lifestyles, entertainment, institutions, politics, and geographic locations.
The key difference between social networks and more traditional online communities is the friend-of-a-friend (FOAF) trust model that exists in social networks. Users maintain direct connections to their friends, but they also have some level of access to the direct connections their friends maintain to other people. The FOAF model enables users to interact with network users to whom they are not otherwise directly connected. Users can establish different rules of engagement for different types of connections in their network; the closer the connection to a user in terms of degrees of separation, the more trusted that user is. For example, privacy settings can be made more stringent for a FOAF than privacy settings for a directly connected friend.
Adapted from: Public Social Networks For Business: Is A FOAF A Foe? Download a complimentary copy of this Info-Tech Research Group report NOW. Free registration required.
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