Urszula Świerczyńska- Kaczor
Visual form - a new approach to communication within social networks

Social networks (e.g. international Facebook, MySpace, Bebo, Polish Fotka.pl), have developed rapidly during the last two years. Their global growth has been phenomenal, however, social networks face increasing challenges to remain competitive with other virtual communities such as virtual worlds or blogs. A key factor in the ever present challenge to stay on top is delivering users new and attractive tools of communication. In this article Facebook is used as the example of a social network which continues developing new forms of communication - both user-user and user-company. This article is focused on the idea of a new communication tool - a visual forum, which can be embedded as a new forum inside the company's profile within the social network. This new tool allows on-line users to express their opinion graphically instead of using text. The key features of building visual forum are:

• users create notes in order to express their feelings about a particular brand,
• users can vote in order to support a comment and the results of the poll are illustrated by a graph.

Changing from the traditional to a visual forum allows companies to obtain the following benefits:

• receiving a clear picture of social network users' opinions,
• the segment of users engaged in dialog with the company increases. Voting is a simple way to express opinion, therefore the numbers of 'lurkers' should be smaller.

The concept of visual forum has yet to be tested. However IT experts assert that the framework for the visual communication tool can be implemented in less than 6 months.