Business Blog: Hoover’s Business Insight Zone

As mentioned earlier, I spent a couple of days last week in Miami Beach talking about social networking. At the conference, I was struck by attendees’ diversity of opinion about social networking and the diversity of their approaches to it as a business proposition.

These differences came through most clearly in the final session of the conference, when I found myself disagreeing with some of the fundamental premises of one of my co-panelists. Maybe this shouldn’t be too surprising, given that social networking is such a young and molten field of endeavor.

There are plenty of folks who don’t even like the term “social networking,” preferring to talk more broadly about the role of social media, or to focus instead on how to build “community” through online means.

To pull together my thoughts on these topics, I’ve worked up a series of five posts that I’ll unroll over the next several days. Here’s are the headings:

• Giving up command, sharing control.
• Social media within and without your company.
• Measurability.
• Gaps in the landscape.
• Many paths up the mountain.

Social networking (or media, or community, etc.) is expanding and evolving so rapidly that this is just the tip of the iceberg, and it’s meant as an exploration rather than any final verdict. So I hope you’ll come exploring with me and be generous with your feedback.

(Image by imageafter.)