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A frequent buzz phrase running around the Internet is social networking. MySpace, Friendster, Orkut, Digg, YouTube all have this in common. You have Friends, Winks, Nudges, Tweets and a whole lot more.

But really what are they? Read More Below...

Simply put social networking is a way to connect users together. Users of these websites can flag other users or be flagged by other users as a related user through a variety of criteria (e.g. manual preference, location, tags). This allows the user to have a ‘clique’ of users they interact with.

A site such as Twitter allows people to quickly post a short message either from the web OR from their mobile phone SMS. That Tweet is then show on the twitter website AND sent to other users phones keeping everyone in contact.

MySpace is one of the titans of social networking. You have Friends you interact with some are your top friends. You can keep in touch with them and see who they are friends with.

Digg displays summarys of news stories around then submitted by their users. The most popular stories percolate to the front page and are those sites are rewarded with a boatload of traffic. Users can Digg stories to show what they like and this contributes to their popularity.

Granted these are brief descriptions of these sites and I haven’t even scratched the surface of the sites that are Social Networks. But the basic premise is connecting users. Prior to the internet our circles of friends were limited to our family, neighbors, classmates and coworkers. Now with these sites the only boundary is how much time you want to spend interacting with these sites.

This then begs the question on how these sites monetize their traffic. The most obvious is advertising. These sites have the ability to profile their users and target ad traffic VERY specifically. They do this by the profile information left, the users history and finally their relationships to other users. These sites also can allow for other sites and media to use their functionality to promote themselves. Having a new movie coming out and having posts appear for fans on Twitter is a GREAT example.

While many of these sites had humble beginnings most people don’t have the technical knowhow to build another one of these. You could create your own niche social network site or leverage these existing sites to work for you. You can use these sites as platforms for exposure to your sites and content. How often recently has a ‘YouTube’ video appeared on the major networks with the ’star’ being interviewed? Granted this may not be the kind of exposure you want but these sites are large pools of users. Users who have been classified and flagged. If you can match your content to them and create relationships through these sites to an audience you then in turn drive traffic to your site.

Finally while these sites foster relationships there are distinct pitfalls to avoid. I’ll be examining in more detail these dangers in a later post. For now explore a few of these sites and see how they work and imagine how you can use them to promote your work.