Philip Hughes, Shawn Cornillot, Abdulrahman Abaalkhail, Kassandra Wright, Chi Nguyen, Peter Hwang, Clement Liao
Social networks have been playing a crucial part in our daily activities nowadays. According to Craig Smith, reporter for Digital Marketing Ramblings, approximately 1.26 billion people use Facebook alone. These online populations continue to increase as social media sites such as Twitter, Instagram and LinkedIn consume more and more generations. Taking advantage of this widespread phenomenon, social networks are utilized by HR professionals to find potential employees and vice versa. These professional social networks have become an important part of the recruiting process and while having many benefits, they can bring various drawbacks as well. First of all, what is a social network? According to Dictionary.com, it is “a network of friends, colleagues, and other personal contacts” and “an online community of people with a common interest who use a Web site or other technologies to communicate with each other and share information resources”. It provides a media platform for users to keep in touch with friends or colleagues that they might not be able to do on a personal level due to distance, time conflict, or for inconvenience. As a result, social networks have progressed into being a major part of most American lives. It started with BBS and CompuServe, the earliest social networking systems. The BBS, or Bulletin Board System, was one of the first social networking services. BBS was an online meeting system where users could download games and files, as well as messages other users. CompuServe was the next big social networking site. Similarly to BBS, it allowed people to share files, and was the first thing to make emailing available to the general public. There were also vast forums that paved the way for how forums are set up today. While BBS and CompuServe formed the way forums are set up, modern social networking started with Friendster. Friendster showed connections between people, and how the users might know each other through the friends they had. Myspace was also another site introduced in 2003 and was very popular amongst teenagers for several years. However, as time went on many people moved to Facebook, the predominant social networking site today.
There are many more social networking sites today than ever before. This also creates more competition as everyone wants their own slice of the pie. For example, blogs are “sites that people set up to provide information and opinions about events, ideas or anything else they want to discuss. Twitter is considered a micro blog due to the fact that blog entries or “tweets” can only be 140 characters or less. Twitter allows for one to “follow” Twitter accounts to interact and keep updated. YouTube is considered a social network site, however, it is video based while most social network sites are text and picture based. An example of a picture based social network is Instagram. According to their website, Instagram is “a fun and quirky way to share your life with friends through a series of pictures.”
All the listed social network sites are used for personal and casual reason. However, some social network sites are intended for helping people build careers and business communities. Professional networking services have had a brief but important history. Although they have only been around for a short amount of time, their impact in the professional world has been huge. Today it makes communication easy and is crucial for businesses. The idea of professional networking has been around for a couple of decades. In 1981 Mike Bloomberg founded Bloomberg LP, an idea that allowed businesses and their clients to communicate and receive immediate feedback. It allowed anyone in the system to communicate easier. Today this site is still being used by big time companies…