Wolf Tracking

Professionals pushing 40 and older are joining the college crowd on the social hub. Move over MySpace, Facebook, is a social utility that connects people with friends and colleagues. People use Facebook to keep up with friends, upload an unlimited number of photos, share links and videos, and learn more about the people they meet. All you need to do to join is have a valid address. To me, that’s a little scary since anyone can have access to your e-mail but I guess this is the way to the 21st century! The website states that people can only see the profiles of confirmed friends and the people in their network. You can also use their privacy settings at any time to control who can see what on Facebook. That makes me feel a little better knowing that not just anyone can see your profile. It reminds me of a former Cohn & Wolfe client, meetup.com where it’s not just one big site, it’s made up of lots of separate networks based around things like schools, companies, and regions, etc. It’s funny because I know quite a bit of younger folks that use these type of websites to post whatever they choose to, but not professionals 40 and older, go figure!

BusinessWeek.com stated that: older users are behind the recent traffic surge at Facebook, which says it signs up 150,000 new users a day. In June, 11.5 million of the individual visitors to the site were 35 or older, more than double the number a year before, according to market researcher ComScore Media Metrix. The 35-and-up crowd now accounts for more than 41% of all Facebook visitors. Among the fogeys with profiles: Internet pioneer and Google executive Vinton Cerf, venture capitalist Vinod Khosla, and Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff. Jeff Pulver, a telecom entrepreneur and blogger, famously said in a recent post that he was forsaking LinkedIn for Facebook as his main professional hub.

The internet has become a big part of everyday life for social life and work life. Millions and millions of people go online each day and it has truly impacted another way for pr professionals to pitch their story ideas or events. Social networking sites can be an ideal vehicle for pr people to go directly to the end-user/consumer. You are bypassing the media and you can do a lot of guerilla networking without a cost to the pr person where you can post regional events or story ideas. Honestly, I have never visited this site or any of its kind before but I am quite intrigued and will have to educate myself on how the old fogeys socialize on the web! Something I must try!