This week, while perusing my usual blogs, I ran across a terrific post by Beth Harte of The Harte Marketing Blog. She has some terrific links that provide great advice on how to properly user social networks  for networking and growing your career professionally.

Here’s the link: The Harte of Marketing

Beth’s post is a terrific starting point for anyone looking to get into social networking and social media in general. I highly suggest that anyone who’s not quite sure where to start will take a look at her post and go through the links – it’ll really help!

My first priority was to find blogs to link too…well, I’ve been following a number of tech and social media blogs for about six months, and it begs the question, what type of protocol is there for linking pages?

Do you email the person that writes the blog and ask permission? This would seem like the most logical thing. Is it considered rude to link and not ask? These are some pretty good questions that any new blogger probably asks.

As for me? Well, I’ll be emailing one of the people that who’s blog I follow and ask politely if I can link them and if there is a proper protocol. It certainly seems like the easiest way to figure it out!

Look for a post in the near future with my findings.  =)

My initial reaction was to say, “To re-establish or build relationships.”

But to people outside of the PR field, what does that really mean? After doing some research, it seems like many people have a very narrow view of social media and the benefits it offers – something that I guess isn’t really a surprise considering how many businesses take social networking for granted.

This person said her view was that it was merely a place where college students met to hook-up. I explained to her to benefits of social networking sites from a business perspective: being able to identify target segments easily, being able to have open, two-way dialog with your publics, and establishing a better brand through constant communication. Of course, those just skim the surface of the benefits, but she still seemed skeptical.

When the business side failed to catch her interest, I explained how it lets people build professional and personal relationships with old friends and new colleagues. She was very much under the impression that if an old friend wanted to contact her, they would contact her regardless of social media.

I agreed, however I explained that Facebook and other social networking sites offer an easy way to find your old friends.

Most of all, as a new professional, this really opened my eyes as to how social media might be viewed by many in the general population and made me take a step back and look at it from a very broad perspective. I think I fell into the trap of believing that since I am very evangelistic about social media – most people must agree.

I was also a little alarmed at the hard time I had explaining what the point of Facebook was. I felt like I had a solid grasp of the pros/cons of social networking and was surprised to be so unsure of my response. It looks like I have a little more reading and research to do.

So tell me, what do you think the point of Facebook is?