Social Networking can help a business

Social networks has a bad reputation, due to problems with sites such as MySpace and Facebook, but, there is a way for many businesses to use the concept of social networking:
1. To help not only with customer loyalty
2. To create relationships in new ways
3. To give customers the chance to help give new ideas to a business

I used to work for Jewelry Television (JTV), so I will use that company, and higher education, as examples, as those are industries I am familiar with.

If you sell gemstones to people, the first question that many people will have is:
OK, so I bought a gemstone, what do I do with it? If your market are jewelers or people that typically have jewelers then it will be a small market, which makes it hard to grow larger.

This is where creating new relationships would be helpful. For example, if you have a networking site that will allow jewelers to interact with non-jewelers (customers :), then people can see examples of what jewelers have created then it is likely that a person will find a jeweler that makes designs that the customer likes, and so the user or the jeweler could buy the gemstone to have it fashioned as desired.

For example, by using these concepts as an example,
http://www.cs.technion.ac.il/~gershon/BeyondEscherForReal/
it would be possible to make some truly fascinating jewelry, as it would look very different from depending on the angle viewed.

To make it truly useful, people should be able to post not only images of what has been done, but drawings of what they would like, and to be able to communicate easily with each other, in a safe way.

Social networking can help out businesses in many industries, by bringing together people that are typically not customers, and extend the market to include these new people.