Those without a particularly active social life in the mid nineties may recall a television series called ?surprise surprise.? Shown on Sunday, and latterly, Friday nights, the shows host, Cilla Black endeavoured to re-unite long-lost cousins, aunts, uncles and siblings from all over the world. This usually led to tearful scenes of joyous reunions and happily ever afters, as the curtain fell on Cilla warbling her way through the show's cringe worthy theme tune.

It was truly awful television, unless you were over 65, in which case it was on a par with Heartbeat as essential viewing.

The show was axed in 2001, and it's not hard to see why. After all, how many people in the 21st century need Cilla to re-unite them with their forgotten cousins in Australia? The answer is very few, and the reason being the internet and social networking sites.

The social networking revolution began with Friends Reunited, a site which allows users to look up old school chums and arrange get togethers. The concept proved to be a huge success, particularly with the ?silver surfers?, the rapidly growing generation of over 50s now getting involved with the internet.

For the younger generation, MySpace and Facebook pretty much dominate the agenda. MySpace is a particularly strong platform for up and coming musicians and Facebook is a means for students to procrastinate their studying and show their appreciation for cult celebrities such as David Hasselhoff.

Whether you like it or not, it is hard to dispute the power of social networking. And it's not just for lazy students either; businesses are increasingly getting involved too. After a failed attempt to buy Facebook, Microsoft recently launched its own equivalent in ?TownSquare?, a social networking site designed specifically for its business applications.

What businesses are finding is that social networking sites are an incredibly successful way to gain exposure online. First and foremost, these sites usually have a high page rank, which means that inbound links are particularly useful in boosting your own site's ranking. Below is a successful example of this:

http://www.facebook.com/hm

Blogs and micro-blogs are another great way of boosting your online exposure, allowing you to disseminate information to a wide, captive audience. Sites such as Twitter allow you to do this.

Social Bookmarking is another tool which can be used to promote your business online. Sites such as Digg and Reddit allow users to vote on articles which they find particularly interesting. Crucially, Google indexes these sites meaning that they frequently appear in search results.

To summarise, the way to harness the power of social networking is by producing engaging, informative and entertaining web content. In doing so, you will encourage people to interact and involve themselves.