My Facebook Application

This is a tough one for me.  I’m conscious of how I want this blog to be.  I see it as a forum for offering ideas and opinions.  You know, tossing stuff about a bit. I’ve been ranting for some time now about the benefits of using social networking to overcome some of the challenges of finding candidates.I followed my own advice recently and employed a company to create a Facebook application for the Onrec site.  The company I used did a great job and I’d like to endorse them, Recruitment Directory, whilst keeping in mind that the raison d’etre of the blog is not to serve as an advertising publication. I just wanted to let folks know about them so that if they choose to follow my lead, they could think about using these guys, or perhaps any number of others out there who do a similar thing.  If you are one of them and want to tell folks about yourselves, let me know in the reply.    

Social Networking Is On Fire!

Social networking is king. I’ve discussed this before and the latest Hitwise Australia data, Asia Pacific Social Networking Report 2008, adds credence to my rants.

“The 40 leading social networking websites experienced strong growth in the past 12 months in Australia, New Zealand,Singapore and Hong Kong; Australia and New Zealand experienced the highest growth, increasing 62% and 88.6% respectively comparing market share of visits to the Social Networks custom category in February 2007 and January 2008.”

I’m not going to bore the heck out of you with a bunch of figures. But check out the graph below for the figure freaks:

I will draw your attention to a few salient points. Prime among these is that of the traffic moving downstream from the major palyers Facebook, Bebo and MySpace, 89% is sent to second tier players. This means that many folks are maintaining several profiles on different sites. Perhaps, for instance, they display a professional profile on one site, whereas on another they might choose to communicate with close friends and family. This makes me wonder at the feasibility of a site that morphs a professional site like LinkedIn with a Social Networking site such as Facebook. Users could maintain several different profiles in the one space.

It also seems that the major players are attracting different audiences. Well-educated and more affluent types are veering toward Facebook, while Bebo attracts multi-cultural and family groups. Important data, especially if you’re doing WHAT I’VE BEEN TELLING YOU TO DO and integrating your online presence with a social networking facility.

Finally, and this is the boon for me (Watch for that word in my future blog. It’s old; retro, if you like, but I’m big on it at the moment), users are increasingly choosing to communicate with one another via social networks. Imagine the world without email. Imagine the world where people’s social and professional and familial alliances are built around their online profiles. Now dump yourselves right in the heart of that space.

Face The Facts

Whether we like it or not, the workplace is going to evolve into an almost entirely electronic arena.  What I mean by that is individuals will communicate with each other via the web, not face-to-face in an office.  Businesses probably will not even have offices in times to come. All of the consultants from Online Recruitment, for instance, pretty much work from home. We have an office in Melbourne, which we use from time to time to conduct meetings and to meet with candidates, but we aim to be entirely online when the rest of the world catches up with our way of thinking.I don’t want to have a discussion about the pros and cons of this.  Whenever I start to evaluate the costs and benefits of this way of operating, I feel as though I’ve stepped back in time and I’m having a chat to one of my printing colleagues about the evils of the printing press.  I don’t dwell on stuff like this, I like to anticipate future directions and run with them.  So don’t try to engage me on this point, it’ll bore the heck out of me.What does interest me, though, is the consequences of this new type of workspace.  It is on this point that some really fascinating questions concerning the role of social networking arise.  Humans are a social species.  Even the most introverted of us gets a buzz out of having a good chat every now and again.  But with no office; and therefore no water cooler, where are these chats going to take place.  How is that special intimacy that develops between colleagues while they’re sipping their water from inadequately small plastic cups going to arise?The answer, my friends, is blowing in the ether.  Social networking sites, such as Facebook, are going to become the means via which business provide employees with a forum for the all important team-building, for encouraging folks to get to know one another “outside work”; really all this amounts to is developing community.  And whether they know it or not, that’s why companies like Seek have created a Seek Group within the Facebook space with about 6,700 members, even including younger family member Joel Bassat. (Shouldn’t you be doing your homework??) A CareerOne employee has started a  CareerOne Facebook Group without any support. Probably because Myspace, owned by their parent company News Limited, is their focus for now with Myspace Jobs. And companies that have banned the use of Myspace and Facebook during working hours are gonna have to think long and hard about how the heck their people are going to communicate personally with each other when there are no longer four physical walls fencing them in.  Onward and forward, folks.