Mixing Business with pleasure

I don’t know if you have noticed, but there seems to be a new way we are meant to catch up with friends, share small snippets of information and show off our photos – Social Networking.  I have always said “I can never find the time to do all this sort of stuff. It’s for the younger generation.” Sort of ironic as I type my blog hey...

This got me thinking.... Should we use these sorts of sites or technologies in our business? In the short I think yes, but carefully.

A few of our team members who use these tools asked if they could represent Web Design Magic via these sorts of sites and proceeded to setup portals in the following websites;

http://www.facebook.com/pages/West-Burleigh-Australia/Web-Design-Magic-Pty-Ltd/57089734321
http://twitter.com/webdesignmagic

Being a sceptic that I am I was sure no one would be interested. You know what – I was wrong. I think these tools work, but you must ensure that you use them wisely. It is pointless to setup a site and abandon it after a month or two. You need to work on your social network regularly but also not to much to “annoy” people.

You must also moderate these sorts of sites. It is common on blogs to allow your readers to save comments. Probably a good idea to moderate these comments just in case you have enraged some not so friendly web surfer. This brings me to other tools for business that follow the model of social networking websites.

As you may be aware there is a product out there called SharePoint. It is a big part of this company and will be for some time. Really it is a collection of forums, collaboration tools, blogs, image sharing tools and document management tools. Sound familiar? In essence SharePoint is a Social Networking tool for business. If we go home and use these sorts of tools to communicate would it not make sense to do something similar at work? We must remember that a majority of our staff are from the generations where this is the norm to communicate. Instant Messaging, Twitter, Facebook.

So there we go. Have a look at our websites above and start building your own. These tools are good for small business who are NOT time poor and have the resources to set them up. And best of all you can do it yourself.