Are Social Networking Sites Useful?

By Roland Piquepaille

I've read several very interesting stories about social networking recently. In "From Contact to Contract" (neat title), Employee Management writes that many entrepreneurs and even professional recruiters are using services such as LinkedIn, Ryze.com, Spoke.com, or one of the two other dozen social networking sites to fill professional positions, even executive ones. Of course, human resources consulting firms are still also relying on more traditional tools, like their 'real' social networks. But in "'Social Web' Has Far To Go, But Much Promise," the American Reporter is more skeptical about the usability of these social networking sites, saying that they are making contacts more difficult instead of easier. And Stowe Boyd, from Corante, concurs, by unlinking from social networking applications he subscribed to in a recent past (links to part 1 and to part 2). So what do you think about these applications? Have you ever used one? And if yes, have you seen some benefits? Read more before answering these questions...

Let's start with the positive side, as reported by Employee Management.

"These tools take networking to the next level," says Gerry Crispin, principal of CareerXroads, a human resources consulting firm in Kendall Park, N.J., and president of the New Jersey Metro Employment Management Association, a Society for Human Resource Management chapter. "These [sites] are no more than advanced databases that are extremely user-friendly."

May be they are user-friendly, but are they efficient?

While the sites can be user-friendly, return-on-investment can vary. Social networking sites are best for finding passive candidates and for filling positions that are too specialized to be filled via traditional methods, users say.

Although LinkedIn boasts 1.2 million members, Crispin says fewer than 5 percent of corporate recruiters use social networking sites. The reason, he says, is partly because the sites are relatively new -- most having started in the past three years -- but also because it is easier to rely on traditional, familiar methods.

But recruiters are still experimenting new methods.

"The best recruiters I know say, 'I use it some. I find people on LinkedIn, then I Google them and contact them myself,'" says Don Steiny, president of The Institute for Social Network Analysis of the Economy, a California-based nonprofit that studies social networking applications. "The best recruiters I know are fearless, and they're just going to call them up."

This long article also tells us about the dark side of social networking sites: sharing information.

"I don't mind sharing that information with friends, but if it's coming from a business computer, who else has access and how are they using it?" says says Susanne Wetzel, a computer science professor at The Stevens Institute for Technology in Hoboken, N.J., who specializes in computer security. "Too much of our information is floating around out there, and technology is becoming more and more sophisticated."

Andy Oram, for the American Reporter looks less to privacy and more to ineffiencies.

I expect most members of online social networks are as inactive as I am, having tried them out and been unimpressed. For one thing, these networks are technologically rudimentary. They rely heavily on email, which is a reasonable place for a new medium to begin because it's universal among Internet users. But how primitive email appears next to other ways of communicating! [...] Eventually, to really take off, social networks should provide alternatives to email rather than relying on it.

Second, the current offerings of social networks are imitations of things already available on the Internet: newsgroup, searches, and chat. There's nothing here you can't get elsewhere. The draw is not what you do on the social network, but whom you have a chance of doing it with.

This leads to the third major problem I've found with social networks: they make contacts more difficult instead of easier. Yes, broadcasting to friends of friends is trivially easy, so much so that I've tried to avoid checking my account because there's so many irrelevant messages (often in languages I can't read). But if I want to target someone for a specific purpose, I find it much easier to use a search engine or a private network of informal contacts than to go through the slow and unreliable process provided by the social network.

So Andy Oram is not very positive. But what do you think of Stowe Boyd, which writes in Corante that he's totally giving up with these social networking sites? Here are some short quotes about his motivations.

I have participated in the various public social networks only passively -- responding to others requests to connect, and occasionally passing along a request to connect to some contact.

I have wound up getting dozens of requests each month in the various networks by people more than two degrees away trying to reach people more than two degrees away, where I have little social capital involved, and I uniformally have been turning down those requests. In essence, these are a form of spam.

And as Boyd says, it's not always easy to exit such a network.

I am annoyed that the SNAs [Social Networking Applications] don't provide opt out at every juncture: please don't involve me in requests like this, please don't allow this person to contact me. please don't contact me ever. The services vary widely in this regard. I was able to drop out of LinkedIn within a 24 hour period, although it does require sending a message to customer support.

I know, I'm asking you to read lots of interesting thoughts. But please do it before answering the above questions about the interest of social networking sites.

Are you using them or planning to dump them? Have they been useful for you? Have you ever fill a very long form asking for your interests? Finally, do you think these sites should be more user-friendly? Please post your comments below.

Sources: Lisa Daniel, for Employee Management, Winter 2005, Vol. 10, No. 1; Andy Oram, The American Reporter, Vol. 11, No. 2,588, February 23, 2005; Stowe Boyd, Corante, February 24 and February 28, 2005

Related stories can be found in the following categories.

• Ecommerce
  
• Economy
  
• Internet
  
• IT
  
• Networking
  
• Social Networks