Social networking allows people who wouldn’t normally meet face-to-face to become friends, and your company could stand to reap the same benefits.

The rise of the Internet has been something of a double-edged sword. On one hand, it has created some of the biggest time-sinks your office has probably ever seen, as employees sneak looks at their Facebook pages, check fantasy baseball statistics and watch old Saturday morning cartoons on YouTube. On the other hand, however, the potential exists for your business to put the siren song of the Internet to work for it. Potentially, when others waste time in their cubicles on the Internet, they could be building your customer base and improving your service.

Experts in business-related social networking on the Internet agree that there’s a lot of potential for a company to put popular sites like MySpace and YouTube to good use. What makes the proposition sound even better is that using social networking can be less expensive and risky than traditional forms of reaching out to customers and partners. Social networking allows people who wouldn’t normally meet face-to-face to become friends, and your company could stand to reap the same benefits.

Online Interaction
Prof. Kim Gregson from Ithaca College in Ithaca, N.Y., teaches classes on mass media, and spends much of her time discussing the impact social networking sites like Twitter and the virtual world Second Life have on personal and professional communication. She says many companies are taking their first steps into the virtual space beyond a corporate Web site and establishing two-way communication with customers.

“I think they’re still kind of leery,” Gregson says. “They realize there’s a lot of people talking and they’ve made some interesting stabs.”

For example, companies such as airline Jetblue and communications giant Comcast have created accounts on Twitter to talk to their customers.

Felicia Palmer has hands-on experience in developing a social networking-based business. She started sohh.com in 1994 as a hip-hop music message board that has since grown into a social networking site with more than 1.7 million members. On the site, users upload their own videos, pictures and music to share with the community.

“What most companies miss is the opportunity to interact with their customers on a very real, personable basis,” Palmer says. “Now they have the ability to really have a relationship with the customer through these social networking sites.”

Rick Faulk is president of Mzinga, a company that builds social networking components for corporate customers such as Ford, ESPN and John Deere.

“[If you’re] getting deeply involved with your customer, [your] prospect base will be embedded in everything you do,” he says.

Sometimes companies can create their own virtual worlds to inspire brand loyalty and drive further sales. For instance, Gregson says, Second Life gives users the chance to create their own personalized avatar that interacts with other users in a virtual space. In-game currency can be bought with real money and used for virtual add-ons like new clothing and even real estate, and Gregson says those sales can carry over into the real world, as well.

“A couple of people in Second Life actually have sales capabilities, so you can buy a computer through Second Life,” she says. Business-to-business interactions are also becoming more common in such spaces. “They’ve even had job fairs in Second Life.”

Putting It To Work
The key benefits of having an online social network presence are that it’s relatively easy to do, inexpensive and gives your company access to information about your customers that used to take months of market surveying to obtain. “It takes very little cost upfront, it’s a time thing,” Gregson says.

“Certainly, to the extent that these are aggregators of people, you can use it for gathering customer feedback [and] doing case studies and demographic surveys,” Palmer says.

Something as simple as a company blog can create more inroads to customers and elicit feedback, Gregson says. “People like to hear backstory,” she says. Companies can also seek out customer comments on their own blogs and respond. “You can reach out to people that are already talking about you. That’s really what people are looking for, responsive follow-up. It’s just another form of good customer service.”

Faulk says the first step in putting social networking to work for your company is to determine a specific business problem to solve, such as improving customer support or generating brand awareness. From there, a Web site needs to have functionality to bring in customers. Social networking should be embedded in a company’s existing Web site to gain the most exposure to it, Faulk says. Otherwise, if the Web site and the social network exist in two different spaces, it will be nearly impossible to guide customers to use either to their fullest potential.

Faulk says it may be tempting to delete posts that paint the company in a negative light, but nothing sours a customer on the experience faster than the sense that only gushing reviews will be allowed on the site. “I think the biggest thing a lot of companies do is they try to be too controlling, and you have to let the community run with it,” he says.

Online Billboards
From a more traditional revenue-stream perspective, creating online communities for customers can also provide opportunities for advertising. Palmer says this can be trickier than it looks, however.

“It’s really difficult from a sales standpoint because a lot of the time advertisers are reluctant to have their ads next to user-created content,” she says. “You have to have moderation in place to make sure that what people are putting up there is appropriate.”

Understanding the site’s audience is also crucial, Palmer advises, because Internet users will likely ignore ads that don’t catch them right away. “I find that generally, when they’re interacting they don’t want ads intruding on their experience.”

‘The Holy Grail’
“This really is the next thing in marketing,” Faulk says. “It is incredibly measurable and a lot of marketing activities are not measurable, and it is incredibly viral. It’s sort of the holy grail.”

Gregson says social networking can help to not only improve the working relationship between your company and its customers, but also create an infectious enthusiasm among customers. “I think it’s going to give companies an opportunity to turn their customers into fans, into sort of advertisers.”