But the company's attempts at launching social-networking tools, Google Buzz and Google Wave, never caught on.
The Microsoft acquisition shows the increasing importance of social networking tools in the enterprise.
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Still, 74% of business owners say they do not use social-networking tools, according to the American Express survey.
Upstarts Yammer and Jive Software are selling similar social networking tools for businesses.
Start-up Rypple brings social networking tools to human resources departments, upending practices like the often-dreaded annual performance reviews.
Whatever you do, Byrne says, you need to be aware of some key issues with social networking tools in general.
Over the last two years, enterprise social networking tools have made great strides as companies look to enable more cross-departmental, cross-geographic collaboration.
For a sports biz journalist, industry conferences are fun, and have their value as networking tools and for an occasional small piece of news.
Firms are starting to use internal social-networking tools, such as Yammer and Chatter, to encourage collaboration, discover talent and cut down on pointless e-mails.
But social networking tools are only the beginning of the efforts schools are making to harness their students' willingness to live an always connected lifestyle.
Rob Tarkoff is the president and chief executive of Lithium Technologies, which advises companies on using social networking tools and technologies to reach their customers.
Financial outperformers (as measured by EBIDTA) are 57 percent more likely than underperformers to use collaborative and social networking tools to enable global teams to work more effectively together.
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The ease by which staff can now connect with one another via social-networking tools like Twitter and Facebook has brought similar expectations to the tools they use in the workplace.
If you are an active user of business-oriented social networking tools, you may often get requests directly from interested parties and customers who come across you online or at some event.
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Your enemies will use social networking tools against you.
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For marketers, the advantage of social media is in being able to use networking tools to add value to a brand experience, not to mention differentiate the brand in the minds of consumers.
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The investigations in the U.S. and Europe suggest the toll that the rivalry has taken on Google as it tries to build more social-networking tools into its own products to compete with Facebook.
What social networking tools provide is a way to break the divides that separate your employees and their expertise from customers and one another, fostering a climate of knowledge sharing and collaboration.
These sites, with names like Prosper.com, Zopa, Lending Club and GlobeFunder, use social networking tools and other software to simplify the borrowing and lending of capital between strangers and even family and friends.
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Students have been at the forefront of the major social movements of the past century, but the advent of social networking tools such as Facebook and Twitter allows them to organize at a faster and more efficient rate.
She was one of the vanguard of lawmakers to allow visitors to her congressional and campaign Web sites to connect with her, or "work as a virtual volunteer, " via a list that includes nearly five dozen social networking tools and multimedia Web sites including Flickr, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Digg.
Rattray decided to launch Change.org on the eve of starting law school at NYU. The company tried building social networking and fundraising tools for nonprofits.
Where others looked at the twin revolutions of blogging and social networking and saw new tools for communication, Karp saw possibilities for making them radically easier and more intuitive.
Social media are the tools and social networking is what you do in the communities.
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In 2010, the levels overall have doubled while the top five tools are Social networking, Blogs, Video sharing, RSS feeds, and Wikis.
Recognizing that these trends are here to stay, IT equipment manufacturers are innovating a new generation of data center, software tools, and networking products that are more energy-efficient than predecessors.
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Paul Gillin, a social media consultant, said such losses are to be expected for an industry that has failed to adapt to the influx of online publishing tools and social networking sites.
The new centre will design and conduct international cooperative research programmes, offer professional training programmes, provide technical assistance, develop effective policy tools and foster networking and cooperation among governments, academia and industry.
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