The continuing rise of Facebook

4^th February 2010 marked the 6^th birthday of Social Networking giants Facebook. Today, 25-year-old Marc Zuckerberg is the world's youngest self-made billionaire. Just six years ago, he was launching an experimental little website out of his student digs at Harvard University. The site soon expanded beyond the Harvard fraternity to other college campuses, with membership reaching 1 million in under a year.

By the end of 2005, with secondary school and international students on board, Facebook had grown to more than 5.5 million members. In another year, there were 12 million users. Here in 2010, Facebook claims over 350 million active users and is, arguably, the most popular social networking site in the world.

In Europe, it accounts for over 30% of time spent social networking and over 4% of all minutes spent online. Figures that are quite outstanding when you take into account that Facebook is a single site competing with the entire world wide web.

With the proliferation of Facebook-capable mobile phones, plus Facebook Connect opening up the service further still (onto Xbox Live, Sony's PlayStation 3 and the Nintendo DSi, for instance), there's plenty of room for it to grow.

There is a strong argument that the use of social networking is useful to businesses and that management should embrace it rather than dismiss it.

“Banning Facebook and the like goes against the grain of how people want to interact” Peter Bradwell, Demos

Using networking technology in the right way to build closer links with employees and potential customers could boost productivity, innovation and create a more democratic working environment.

Firms are increasingly using networking software to share documents and collaborate in ideas, are you?

Have you given in to the social networking movement? Have you had a defining moment? Did you participate in the Rage against the machine protest? Did you participate in Doppelganger week?

Snow Ready?

December 2009 saw temperatures in the UK drop to almost record breaking lows. Travel conditions became perilous, with road closures, rail cancellations and air disruption rife. Widespread School closures caused even more havoc, which according to the Federation of Small Businesses, had a significant knock on affect for many companies through lost working days.


Before the snow became such a problem, we had the threat of the swine flu pandemic bringing the country to a stand still. The reality was far less dramatic, but businesses did see unusually high rates of employee absenteeism.


Neither one of these threats have been completely conquered, and even if they had, the truth of the matter is that there is always another potential threat around the corner. Today, businesses can take steps to improve their communication and information technology infrastructures to buffer the effect of an outbreak on their daily operations. This is not necessarily as complicated or expensive as it sounds.


One of these steps is switching to a business VoIP service, which allows employees full and secure access to the business communications network of their company from their homes. The flexibility and features of this service makes it suitable for all types of organisations, but in particular those that are mutil-sited. It allows for employees to be just as efficient when they are outside of the office, as they are in the office. This means that if they are contagious, they can work from home without the risk of spreading illnesses among their peers. Furthermore, if they are stranded due to bad weather, they can continue to work without disruption.


To overcome the effects of a national crisis, businesses need to make sure that they have a flexible working policy in place to avoid unexpeted downtime, and ensure employees that can’t make it into work can continue working productively from home, or indeed wherever they are.


Helpful Links:

VOIP Solutions and SIP Trunks
Your Business and Swine Flu
Homeworker
Mobile Working
Audio Conferencing
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