Question: What professional benefits do you see by investing time into a FOAF-style network?
From a personal standpoint, investing time into a Friend of a Friend network can do great things as far as networking goes in the professional world. In recent years, I have been told time and time again that in order to get a job, you truly need to know someone. This is where FOAF comes in. By expressing yourself on an FOAF-style network, you can spread yourself and who are you are to people all over the world, create relationships, and ultimately aid in the process of “selling yourself” for job purposes.
From a corporate standpoint, investing time for research purposes can provide monumentally valuable information to a company in aiding in their marketing strategy. One of every company’s toughest tasks is to identify accurate market segments of different populations of people to whom they will market and sell their products too. An FOAF-style network allows businesses to not only research the product desires and suggestions of many different people, but social aspect allows for firms to more accurately identify the number of potential customers in different target areas. Any information like this enhances a firm’s ability to earn profits and cut costs by not wasting marketing time, money, and energy on people that this type of social network can tell them to disregard.
You nailed it... -> By expressing yourself on an FOAF-style network, you can spread yourself and who are you are to people all over the world, create relationships, and ultimately aid in the process of “selling yourself” for job purposes.
ReplyDeleteThese networks can introduce you to "the crowd" within an industry or career before you're a fully invested member yourself... and that can obviously carry advantages.