In a recent MeetingTechOnline interview with Aaron Kahlow, Managing Partner of BusinessOnLine and chair of the Online Marketing Summit, the conversation turned to a discussion of perceptions, specifically pessimism, about social networking in the meetings industry. Kahlow recently gave a presentation on this topic as a member of the SISO (Society of Independent Show Organizers) 2007 Executive Conference Tech Panel. The panel's topic of "Best Practices on the Web" revolved around the observation that the social networking sphere is becoming dominated by a handful of major public-domain networking companies, specifically Facebook and MySpace. Does this trend remove the need for small, private domain social networking sites such as IntroNetworks, BDMetrics, and Leverage? According to Kahlow, a fog of cynicism obscures the perception of social networking as a viable business solution.

According to Kahlow, this is an unwarranted fog of cynicism. This cynicism is a natural backlash from the amount of hype that these major social networking portals have recently received. "It's easy, in a very old industry to joke around the hype. There is more hype than there should be; there always is. I think there are some fundamentals there that need to be addressed. Let's not make fun of the obvious," he says.

The obvious, however, is not so simply overlooked. Facebook boasts a network 30 million strong, and MySpace has only continued to expand since the addition of its 100 millionth member last summer. These numbers easily feed the perception that social networking has dissolved into the monopolizing hands of two major companies, a move which has fueled the cynicism of many. However, this may be only one particular and narrow view of the social networking scene. Facebook and MySpace specialize in the sheer volumes of people they network. Their problem is that they lack focus and cohesion as a community. Facebook may have started out with these community traits, like specifically networking college students, but they have since traded that specific, targeted approach for a high-volume approach. According to Kahlow, there is more need for the "old-school Facebook" paradigm.

"I think the more successful social media are the ones that get more focused and more specific to the interest level. And the great thing is that it won't be hindered by geography so now you have communities that like to do certain things, or are interested in certain things," said Kahlow.

A natural fear is that different paradigms of social networking will create a big aggregate mess. If someone is looking to network with an independent meeting planner who also has knowledge of obscure Chinese dialects, where does one even begin the search? Do they start with a search on a giant social network like MySpace and filter through thousands of results, or do they search the internet for a highly targeted social network and come up with a smaller pool of candidates? Either way, this creates a jumbled, cumbersome search. Kahlow's solution is the creation of a social networking hierarchy.

"You have this macro community; you are part of a country," he goes on to explain, "but there is no reason why you are not also part of a small municipality, city, or township: a smaller community within the community."

This paradigm of fitting smaller networking communities neatly inside of larger communities like Facebook and MySpace offers promise. For example, linking a profile that was created on a small, targeted network into a MySpace profile allows for overlap across user profiles, reaching both the public, volume-driven social networks and the smaller, targeted networks.

The social networking vision that Kahlow presents is compelling in the sense that it allows for social networking to develop a stable bivalence; A company like IntroNetworks can peaceably coexist alongside Facebook. Public and private domain social networking sites have their spheres of influence in both the business world and in people's personal worlds. However, the idea that aggregate public domain networks will dominate the business scene is unlikely due to their size. A more targeted approach to social networking is vital to creating meaningful, localized connections in the business world. The "community inside a community" paradigm is fitting. While MySpace and Facebook have certainly come to dominate personal social networking, business networking requires its own separate niche.