Social Net'g

     Social Networking is here to stay, lets just start by accepting that; the question is: Other than for keeping my friends up to date with my daily meal choices or announcing my mood, what is Social Networking good for? The fact is that with more and more industries realizing the reach that social networking gives them, it is widely becoming an essential tool in any company's marketing, and recruiting hand bag.
    Social Networking is being used everywhere; it is huge on Capital Hill nowadays, with just about every politician having some form of social media. Whether it is Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, etc., it is all fair game in an effort to reach the most people. So it would only make sense that businesses would also follow suit and join in to gain business. I used to work at a hotel in midtown that had a Twitter and Facebook page where we would post events that took place at the hotel and pictures of the guests having a good time.
     It is an astonishing leap forward in the form of a recruiting tool for companies looking to fill high level positions and down. Cites like LinkedIn, [...grant the user access to a network of over eight million professionals spread throughout the world, including executives from all Fortune 500 companies...,] says Frank Langfitt in the article, Social Networking Technology Boosts Job Recruiting,  posted on npr.org. The article quotes a Shally Steckerl who says, "...effectively, I had a thousand contacts that could potentially lead me to 100,000, now I have 8,500 contacts that could potentially lead me to 4.5 million."
    Advertising companies are using social media to target the right people with advertising for maximum effectiveness. They buy big data from sites like Facebook to get user activity as well as interests and likes, they then use the information to tailor custom ads targeted at getting their business. But as Eden Zoller, Ovum research analyst, warns, "Facebook graph search will no doubt leverage member data to provide advertisers with more targeted, personalized advertising opportunities going forward. But Facebook needs to tread very carefully here and be mindful of user privacy,..."
     So how far is to far? Will we see the line in the sand before we go past it? Unfortunately, I don't think so. I believe that we are so engrossed with social networking that while the benefits seem to out way the cons, at the moment, we will hit a tipping point that it will be very hard to turn back from once we realize it.