The City of Boston is hoping to harness social networking to drive business development and expansion in the once-loaded commerce region with the launch of a new Web site.
The free use site, www.bostonworldpartnerships.com, is aimed at enabling members of academia and business to share ideas of how to promote Boston as a venue for commerce. It’s set to debut next month and feature blogs, chat communities and data on local events of relevance.
While social networking sites have proven very popular as means for groups of people to discover and interact socially online, with some enabling the sharing of professional contact data, use of a site to help drive business for a city appears to be new.
Boston Mayor Thomas M. Menino launched the effort and sees the social networking site as having much the same functionality as Facebook, only with the ultimate goal of bring more and new business to Beantown.
Social networking could help cushion the one-two punch of a troubled economy and states like Massachusetts reacting by cutting employees from their budgets.
