Social Networking Sites Seem Light on Business Utility

According to many, the days of handing out your business card in your hotel's lobby bar somewhere in Las Vegas or San Diego will soon be a corporate courting ritual relegated to the annals of Business Past.

The Future You will have a semi-customized Web page as your calling card. Just as your kids are trying to join the cool clique in their middle school through Facebook or myspace, you will likewise be trying to get the attention of aspirational business partners, accomplished colleagues, ad salespeople and trade publishers.

As more young people born in the Internet age join the workforce, they say more and more of our social and business interaction will take place through these same social networking portals. But is this all the daydream of online advertisers hungry for click-throughs?

Microsoft believes in social networking's potential, having invested $240 million in Facebook in late October for just a 1.6 percent share. Since then, media outlets and bloggers balk at the $15 billion valuation of a site that relies almost completely on ads, and thus continued popularity among its young and fickle user base, for revenue. They watch for any sign of a dip in traffic or a strengthening of competition. In other words, will we be asking in a few months, will Google's Orkut change the face of enterprise communication?

But really, the most important question is this: Sure, kids like social networking's less risky road to popularity, but what do any of these social networking sites offer to adults that is likely to replace more traditional means of business communication and workflow?

If everyone is aggregating connections on Facebook or LinkedIn, boasting of how many "500+ friends" they have, then how much does your connection with any one of those 500 people really mean? Is it backed up by any kind of trust or any other quality that would make anyone significantly more likely to do business with you? And even if the answer to that question is yes, will they be able to fish your communication out from all of the dozens of less trusted connections, new friend requests and spammers?

What about connecting with coworkers through the site and applications built off of it? If your aim is to have a platform to communicate with and share work with coworkers, then why clog it with strangers haranguing you to be their friend, the inevitable spam, and, worst of all, advertising? And if you have your account set to private, you aren't immune.

At the very least, these sites aren't ready for their day in the enterprise sun yet, reliant as they are on advertising and as vulnerable as they are to security breaches and privacy invasion.

Bottom line: I wouldn't go burning your boxes upon boxes of business cards and cancelling your frequent flier account just yet.