Isn “online community” just for high school and college kids?
Don’t be thrown by the word “social”. Although online community such as MySpace (known as a hangout for high schoolers) and FaceBook (which targets the college crowd) have garnered much press in the online community space, other professionally-focused online networks are utilized in many ways in the business and association realm. The initial use of online community for businesses and organizations has been primarily along one dimension, recruiting. That is, a recruiter for an organization navigates a network of known individuals (e.g. current members of the organization) in order to find potential applicants (either contacts of those individuals, or contacts-of-contacts) who have the skills and experience needed to fill a job opening within the organization. While this application of online community is beneficial (especially to professional recruiters), there are many other areas where online communities can be used; and are more broadly applicable.
