Social networking no longer means working a room with your business card. Now it means working a virtual room full of "friends," in places like MySpace, Facebook, or LinkedIn, with your computer.
Not just for search and shopping anymore, the Internet is becoming one big social network. Some people call this the "conversation-based" economy—word of mouth moving at information-superhighway speed. An example is meeting planners passing comments on travel sites.
And social networking, also known as social media or Web 2.0 technology, isn't just for kids or twentysomethings. Some 40 percent of Facebook users are 35 to 55, while two thirds of the 56 million MySpace users are over 25. But there is some truth in the "used by kids" misnomer. Communications via Facebook, YouTube video, podcast, blog, and other social media "are the native tongue to the younger workers in an organization," notes The Economist.
Social Networking and the Meeting Planner Social networking is "about creating connections among users based on their shared interests or a dedicated purpose," according to The Travel Marketer's Guide to Social Media and Social Networks, by Cindy Estis Green, published by Hospitality Sales & Marketing Association International (HSMAI). She adds, "For meeting planners, social media animates the story, with rich media and interactive discussion creating more color and a more relevant story than a flat brochure."
As a result, a whole ecosystem of social media relevant to meeting planners has sprung up. This includes blogs, profile pages on social networks, RSS (really simple syndication, which lets you choose what news or info you want sent to you), tweets (instant www.twitter.com messages answering the critical "What are you doing?" question), and podcasting (video or audio files to play over your PC or download to your iPod). Then there are video and photosharing sites like YouTube and Flickr; Wikis, collaborative Web pages you can add to, as in Wikipedia, the user-generated online encyclopedia; and widgets, small utilities like Southwest Airlines' desktop "ding" announcing new fares.
"Travel 1.0, when travel planning moved online, was all about prices," says Fiona Lake Waslander, director of product management at Yahoo! "No longer are you looking for a hotel just based on price, but you're looking at user reviews, user ratings, and photos."
Key meetings vendors like Marriott and Hilton, destination cities like Philadelphia, and airlines like Southwest with its popular "Nuts about Southwest" blog are jumping on the social media bandwagon with interactive and rich media offerings. Last year, IHG's Crowne Plaza and InterContinental Hotels chose the virtual community SecondLife to "meet" with meeting planners (or their avatars). To show its expertise in running large meetings, Crowne Plaza launched "The Place to Meet" island. It wasn't just an ad—they hosted several virtual meetings in SecondLife. Of course, it was also an opportunity to show off their skylit conference rooms, modern meeting spaces, and palm-tree-filled destinations.
So a meeting planner's site search is now often a "mashup" of video, audio, text comments, photos, and mapping from MapQuest or Google Earth. And when that meeting's over (or sometimes still in progress), you're almost guaranteed to see a comment on a blog, shared photos from an event, or perhaps delegate follies on YouTube.
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