Social Networking

The power of social networking within a professional standpoint can be extremely beneficial yet also corrosive.  As a business, you want to have as much advertising as possible to be heard and known to advertise your product or service.  Because of this, there is no better form of advertisement than free advertisement such as word of mouth and word of click.  Expending advertisement to social media exposes your business to a whole new crowd that is virtually infinite.  As more and more people post about you or your product, the more exposure you obtain.  The potential growth of this is exponential.  As we see in the article "The Media Equation",  Obama's 2008 campaign reached out to Facebook for help raising money and earning support.  The article states:  “Other politicians I have met with are always impressed by the Web and surprised by what it could do, but their interest sort of ended in how much money you could raise. He was the first politician I dealt with who understood that the technology was a given and that it could be used in new ways.”  With this Obama was able to generate a database with millions of names of supporters who can be engaged almost instantly.
Social networking can also cause much problems when it comes to rating products and leaving feedback on products of services.  In the article "Can You Trust Crowd Wisdom?", Kostakos says "If you have two or three people voting 500 times, the results may not be representative of the community overall."  This kind of interaction with the site will most definitely skew the reviews one way.  It seems as if voting habits play a big role in whether to trust reviews or not.  A big company who relies heavily on this voting system is Amazon.  Because of the problem that may occur when it comes to rating products and writing reviews,  Amazon began letting users rate the review on its helpfulness.  

Articles Cited
The Media Equation
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/10/business/media/10carr.html?_r=1

Can You Trust Crowd Wisdom?
http://www.technologyreview.com/web/23477/?a=f