The future of social networking in business.

I actually regard the above statement as a little redundant.

Social networking as a non-technological concept has been present in business since the first cave man wandered over to his mate Ugg's cave and said something like 'Hi, shall we hunt some big hairy foodie stuff together and flog it to the lot in the next valley?'

Facetious maybe but a fair supposition. Social networking just 'is' and in a business context it is essential.

With regard to the recent explosion in technologically driven social networking for business I genuinely believe there is some confusion. I am however happy to concede that this confusion exists in my own mind. I am always happy to listen and learn so please help me out.

There are many sites out there, some of which you can argue are purely about networking socially. Facebook, Bebo, MySpace etc. There are also some amazingly good sites aimed at the business user (and note my careful differentiation) LinkedIn and Ecademy spring easily to mind. The former has huge presence and mass membership but seems to be heavily used as a recruitment arena primarily. The latter has a smaller membership but a hugely focussed group of people endeavouring to help one another; in fact, as I write, there is a poll going on Ecademy designed to determine whether Ecademy member are looking to develop their business (knowledge, resources, ideas) or to develop sales (look for customers). My confusion with this deepens as I was always of the opinion that to develop your business you have to sell stuff. The other stuff is essential of course, you can't sell when you don't have some knowledge, resources and ideas but you can't sell if you don't, well, sell.

I have read a bunch of comments following the blog containing the poll and there is a good deal along the lines of (obviously not a direct quote) 'Dear me, sell to my fellow members? That would be awful!'

My question would be, if you are using a business related social network, why not sell stuff? The answer which seems obvious to me is that if you do, then you risk annoying a lot of people who are not there to buy anything, they are there to sell but may be being too polite to ask!

Please don't misunderstand me, Ecademy is a tremendous concept, I am a member and have been for a long time. It does some great work. What it doesn't seem to be though is a forum for people to go to to buy and sell things. Not a criticism in any way.

So, how do you sell stuff? The obvious answer is to do all your normal marketing things and not forget the internet. Do your website well, us search engine optimisation and Google and whatever else to drive people to your site. All well and good but if you are selling bathrooms in London, you will be competing with hundreds or thousands of others doing just what you are doing and you will be swapping page rankings as fast as you can pay your SEO people to keep you at the top of the searches.

So far, I suppose, all well and good. People who want to talk about doing business without actually doing any are well catered for. People who want to find other people either just to talk to or to find to fill jobs in their talent base are equally well catered for.

People who want to go to a search engine and plough through a gazillion entries to find a new bath tap; well we know they are well catered for and we know how to 'trick' the search engines so they always find us (until your competitors get a little bet at trickery than you that is!)

So what is missing, well for me, it has been the ability to go to 'somewhere' and say 'What I really, really need right now is.....some bright shiny new bath taps' and I haven't been able to do that.

The whole concept of Web 2.0 with its inherent creativity, sharing, social networks, blogs and so forth haven't given me any way to shout, 'Hey world, I need some stuff' and get some people I know who are good at selling stuff to come to me.

I guess that's why we launched WeCanDo.BIZ!