Social media - heady expansionism?
Jinfo Blog

By Tim Buckley Owen

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Frenetic is the only word to describe the activity surrounding social media for business at the moment. Whether it’s keeping a wary eye on leaks, beefing up your customer relations or leveraging your career opportunities, there’s plenty to keep track of.

Leaks first. On 22 March Wolters Kluwer Law & Business launched Wikiwatch, a blog forum in which experts will try to assess the potential damage caused by corporate revelations from WikiLeaks (with which, of course, the Wolters Kluwer service has no connection). With the emphasis on fast answers to incipient disclosure crises, the company makes the point that it doesn’t matter whether the details are accurate or the information sources valid or not – the damage is still done.

Meanwhile news and social media monitoring specialist Meltwater has bought JitterJam, which it describes as a leader in social media customer relationship management. Meltwater already includes search engine marketing solutions among its suite of products, and notes that social CRM has evolved from a curiosity to an emerging business necessity; JitterJam’s expertise will enable marketing, communications and advertising professionals to engage with customers on social channels, it says.

Then there’s Facebook, which appears to have acquired Pursuit, a recruiting specialist which offered incentives to people to use social media to refer people for jobs. It’s not so much an acquisition, though, as a gathering in of Pursuit’s founders, who seem to be dropping their baby altogether in favour of a new life with the social media colossus – prompting Techcrunch to comment that Facebook acquisitions are “almost always about engineering talent versus product”.

Click on the founders’ names on the Pursuit website and you find yourself at their LinkedIn profiles – and, as LinkedIn passes 100 million members, it too is busy rendering itself more and more indispensable as a recruiting tool. At a tough time for employment prospects, it has just launched a LinkedIn Job Portal for students and recent graduates – recommending jobs, plugging the LinkedIn Company Pages, and claiming that a LinkedIn profile is a great way for companies to find you.

It’s also improved the LinkedIn Groups Jobs tab, saying that this will make it easier for group members to find and share high quality job content. And, following a survey showing that half of French professionals are looking to change jobs in 2011, LinkedIn has opened a Paris-based sales office from where a new marketing director will also target EMEA – Europe, the Middle East and Africa.

It’s all heady, expansionist stuff – but there is one possible cloud on the horizon for social media: Europe’s moves to toughen up its already rigorous privacy laws could be joined by a similar initiative from the United States. More on this anon.

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