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Digital Transformation

Social Networking vs Social Media

So I’ve seen a lot of people change up how they use these two terms.  In my minds, they are very different although the base technologies used as people going about networking and working the social media may have a huge overlap.

social media: the use of tools like twitter, facebook, blogs, etc to both monitor how your company is doing with your customers and to market your company.

social networking: the use of web 2.0 tools like twitter, facebooks, jive, sharepoint, lotus connections, wikis, blogs, etc to keep up with colleagues, share information, and find information.  This is a natural evolution to the social network you probably already have when you call people, engage people around the water cooler, send emails etc.  These new technologies make it easier to find people and find answers even if your legacy social network is small.

As people continue to make use of web 2.0 tools to to do both, I think we’ll see a maturation of thought around it and of additional tools like social analytics to measure both the quality of social media efforts as well as how a company is using a social network and who is important to that network.  Can you imagine a time when HR will use a social analytics tool to look up a person before they allow a counter-offer to be made in order to keep him or her?

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Michael Porter

Mike Porter leads the Strategic Advisors team for Perficient. He has more than 21 years of experience helping organizations with technology and digital transformation, specifically around solving business problems related to CRM and data.

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