This is one answer to a bunch of questions that I posted here on social media, more answers to follow to that post in the future.
First the easiest way to answer this question; How effective is Social Media? is to demonstrate it:
Go to Google and type in: How effective is social media?
Google doing what it does best comes back with a nice varied selection of articles. From the good side to the bad side and the ugly of course.
On the good side you have
Jeremiah Owyang of Forrester Research recently met experts in the field to discuss how effective social media is in a recession
Article here:
On the bad Side:
Social media “struggling for effective metrics” Just what is success and how do you measure it click here for the article
And the ugly:
Leon Apel makes a case that all the time and effort may not be worth it:
Article here:
There are many other results on the page that are worth looking at, this is just my selection.
Just recently somebody tried to sell there twitter profile on Ebay. Strange as it may seem and almost laughable. He did manage to get $1,125 plus for his profile
Is this real value of his network? It may not be so far wrong. Moving into the 21st century more and more people will be conducting there sales research, people research etc online. If you do not have profile you may well be drawing a blank. People will expect to be able to reference you or check you out online. In the pursuit of sales I imagine that all these companies are going to be using these tools.
Would I employ somebody who is well networked? Sure I would.
The real value in social networking may be only just be starting to be unraveled, while I am not suggesting that we all start selling our profiles. I do think that individuals with well managed net works will be setting themselves up for whole lot more business at sometime in the future. As posted here by Owen, we may be related to every one much closer than we think. By networks in this blog post I am referring to social media sites, whether that is Linkedin, Facebook, community sites or a blog. To name but a few.
What do you think?
