Two ways of looking at social networking sites

For the ladies of Square Rootz, the push and pull of MySpace always trumps traditional marketing when getting the word out about their year-old lifestyle and media collective.

They post announcements there for Philadelphia and New York events. They link MySpace friends to the grassroots organization's blog entries. MySpace acts as an indispensable business tool, says the group's cofounder, Marly Pierre-Louis.

Yet ask Pierre-Louis how she feels about MySpace as a social tool, and that's another story. The 25-year-old calls it time-consuming and inherently misleading.

"It creeps me out that people can represent themselves as whoever they want to be through these online profiles," she said.

Pierre-Louis epitomizes the love/hate relationships that many people have with social networking sites. Sure, you can get the word out. Sure, that cute guy you like can find you when he needs to - but so can your ex. And the girl who really, really wants to be your friend. And that colleague at work who's mildly creepy. Not to mention strangers fixated on your photos.

Pierre-Louis recalls men who have approached her for dates on MySpace, sending messages asking to talk to any of Square Rootz's three female administrators.

"Everyone represents themselves as what they wish they could be and not what they are," Pierre-Louis says. "It's taken away from the intimacy of human interaction."

And yet that prized human interaction is what makes social networking sites tick. Known as "social media" in interactive marketing circles, the phenomenon evolved from small online communities built around users with common interests. Friendster, the first big site to cater to the general population, set the template in 2002, then failed to grow quickly enough to meet demand. That's when MySpace and Facebook stepped in, offering users unprecedented ways to make their most personal dreams and desires public.

Temple University professor Munir Mandviwalla studied the social networking phenomenon with a large local firm currently using an internal social networking tool. Because people have an innate desire to engage with others by, for example, chatting with a neighbor in line at the market, Mandviwalla says, social networking sites offer a hassle-free way to share news instead of taking 15 minutes to explain ourselves to each person who comes along.

Social media give individuals and organizations the three key elements of human relationships - discovering, interacting and sustaining - in one place for the first time, according to Mandviwalla, who is executive director of the Institute for Business and Information Technology at the Fox School of Business.

Sites such as MySpace, along with top competitor Facebook and a handful of smaller sites including LinkedIn, Twitter, Ning and YouTube, are reshaping the way humans benefit from being social creatures. By setting up a profile, linking to friends on the site, and updating personal or professional status, people use social networking sites as part little black book, part self-penned gossip column.

On the flip side, Mandviwalla says social networking poses problems for users because the phenomenon is so new. With its required maintenance and upkeep, the Web 2.0 version of pledging a sorority can cause as much stomach-churning anxiety as navigating the real-life social world. Many users haven't learned the clues for detecting what types of strangers can pose a danger, although Mandviwalla says teenagers are figuring this out one step ahead of their parents.

"If somebody messages too much, [teenagers] think of that person as a weirdo," Mandviwalla says. "That's a way of developing a norm for who you're going to engage with."

If Facebook is the do-it-yourself digital yearbook of Web 2.0, where users list accomplishments and quotes, then MySpace feels like a scrapbook, with photos, downloads and comments pasted together, and sometimes covered with graffiti. Twitter, a site of micro-blogs, is like a basketful of notes left behind in study hall.

Social networking lets you choose your clique: LinkedIn acts like a business fraternity, comprising a vast network of professional references and resumes. YouTube is the AV club, where amateur filmmakers post their clips. And Second Life is the drama club, with creative avatars inhabiting virtual worlds. As the original social networking site whose youthful bloom has faded, Friendster has taken the role of last year's prom queen.

But sometimes the clique chooses you, and therein lies another real-life social issue reflected online: peer pressure.

Michelle Freeman, a 25-year-old freelance publicist, has posted profiles on Friendster, Facebook and MySpace, and says she envisions herself joining Twitter eventually. Although Freeman has complaints about each site's functionality and useless extra applications, she has exerted some social-networking peer pressure. Her boyfriend refused to sign up for any social networking sites but started logging on to Freeman's profiles. Now, she says, he's addicted.

"I pressured him probably, and his friends pressured him," Freeman says. "He started a MySpace page for our cat, too."

It's not as though social networking is an exclusive domain. Any cat, rat, or drunk-girl-in-disguise knows how easy it is to create an imaginary identity on a whim.

Steph Flati, who manages the MySpace page for her band the Lopez, took advantage of the site's uploading-for-dummies technology one night after a few too many drinks. Disguised in hat, sunglasses, bathrobe and cigar, the elementary school art teacher posed for a photo and posted herself incognito on MySpace. She immediately regretted the upload and deleted the page instantly.

Even among Philadelphians without a creative endeavor to promote, social networking's easily manipulated profile format can strike a sour note.

Nadine Doolittle, 33, an estate-planning attorney and new mother, was turned off from social networking when she saw a relative's exaggerated life story on an online profile. Since then, she says, the sites have just seemed like a time drain.

"I have a job, I have a little baby, I have a social life," Doolittle says. "It seems like an added burden. Every day I get a hundred e-mails, and the last thing I want to do is go on a site to see if people are contacting me."

Others, like Lisa Blackwood, see online networking as a low-effort way for socially awkward people to meet others.

"People find you on it, then they send you e-mails and it's almost like, 'Leave me alone,' " says Blackwood, 32.

She lists the half-dozen ways she'd rather socialize: pick up the phone, drop an e-mail, meet for a drink, get a manicure, go to the movies, grab dinner on weekends. Call her old-fashioned, but she prefers even her professional networking with fellow attorneys to be face-to-face.

For stay-at-home mothers, a key demographic with limited face-to-face interaction in the real world, social networking sites provide a much-needed outlet. According to officials at MySpace, 40 percent of mothers in the U.S. use the site, and not just for keeping tabs on their online teens.

Kelly Clough, 33, a mother of two, says Facebook is an easy, user-friendly way to view photos and send messages while her children are napping.

"As a stay-at-home mom, it's nice to connect with grown-up people during the day and have real adult socialization," says Clough, adding that she posts new photos every two weeks.

Steve Pearman, senior vice president of product strategy at MySpace, says the site provides self-expression and global connection to anyone who may feel isolated or confined. To that end, Pearman says, MySpace is committed to creating a larger sense of community tailor-made to users' needs.

"The users are always going to be way smarter than we could ever be," Pearman says. "We have to respect that and give them what they want."

Currently, MySpace and Facebook are in close competition for users, with Facebook at 123.9 million unique visitors to MySpace's 114.6 million, according to comScore's numbers of worldwide users in May. Numbers like these may matter to advertisers, but for now the distinction is hardly enough to sway a potential joiner.

In the future, which social networking site emerges as the front-runner may come down to an old-fashioned popularity contest.

"I don't think it's about better technology," says Freeman, the publicist. "It's about where the masses are."