Social Networking and Web2.0 are both buzzwords which you probably see a lot of these days. Unless you have been living under a rock the last several years, you are probably well aware of social networking websites - their goal is to bring together people who have common interests. Some of the better known social networking sites are MySpace, LinkedIn and Facebook.

For website owners, there is something to be noted here - wherever there are people, there is an opportunity to generate traffic for their website. The idea here if you want to generate traffic is to build a community of people who may be interested in the products or services you provide and getting them to visit your site in order to learn more. For business lead generation, there are a few obstacles to overcome along the way.

One challenge is that you will be reaching an audience which skews very young via these websites; most users of social networking sites are of 30 years of age or younger. If yours is a product or service aimed at corporate buyers on the other hand (few of which are in this age group) then you will have a hard row to hoe trying to get leads on MySpace. It all depends on who your target market is.

These users are also notoriously difficult to sell to. They will be resistant to any hard sell tactics; take a gentle approach and be subtle when introducing them to your business rather than just hitting them with a sales pitch right off the bat. Having the right product is paramount here, as is the ability to mobilise social networking users to visit your site and to learn more about it.

My colleague Nick Schoonen has a blog (rczero.com) which is target towards remote control enthusiasts - remote control planes, cars and so on. He also has a plan to monetize the site; while I won’t get into that here, I will mention that he has been very successful at using social networking to drive traffic to his site. The reason that he has been such a success at this is that the audience he is going for is more or less the same one as is to be found on these social networking sites.

Suppose that your business is something a bit less appealing to a youth-oriented market; garbage disposal, for instance. MySpace probably isn’t the right venue for your business to generate traffic.

To summarise, in the business lead generation, or business traffic generation area, I think that social networking sites are less dollar productive than most of the other strategies we we’re talking about today. If you had to decide, I would suggest focusing on other strategies first.