A: A very timely question, Wayne . This was a hot issue at the recent ITT Conference in Oman , and was discussed at length by Nick Jones of Yahoo! Search Marketing. Social networking sites, of which the biggest players are currently MySpace, Friendster, Facebook and Bibo, achieve huge traffic – did you know that MySpace is the 6 th most viewed site online?

Many companies can benefit from the traffic from social networking sites, however remember that these sites are dominated by certain demographics; particularly the under thirties. For companies that are interested in selling to this sector, social networking sites are a goldmine.

Here’s how you do it. Sign up for and create a user profile and use this to post links to your website. These might include blogs, feeds and so on. Make sure you tread as lightly as possible. If your profile looks spammy then viewers will post negative comments and your profile is likely to be terminated. Keep your text calm and neutral. You must show the value of your product or service to the online community.

Hope that helps, Wayne . Good luck!

Huw