Business has always been social. Building relationships and trust with an eye on eventual profit is the implicit goal behind client-wooing practices like wining and dining prospects, hitting the links with industry colleagues or issuing invites to catch a ball game in the company box.

Enter the social-computing craze of the past few years, with instant messaging, wikis, message boards and networking Web sites for every interest, and increasingly businesses are looking to leverage those tools to recruit talent, attract customers and boost internal collaboration.

Recruiting talent

Generation Y is a target market for a lot of employers, says Katy Bruya, senior vice president of human resources at Spokane-based Washington Trust Bank. “They are the next generation of customers and employees, and they have Internet savvy.”

To attract this generation, Washington Trust recently launched corporate Facebook and MySpace pages with photos, descriptions and a self-produced video spoofing the sitcom “The Office.”

The goal, Bruya says, is to go where the people are and use humor to show potential employees that Washington Trust is a fun and rewarding place to work. In the process, it hopes to break the boring-suit stereotype of banking.

While Washington Trust continues to use traditional methods of marketing and recruiting, Bruya says it added the social sites to reach passive candidates who aren’t actively looking for work and who may not have considered a banking career.

The only investment in the project was time and pizza for the employees who acted in the video, so Washington Trust expects the return to be good.

“I’m confident it is going to work,” she says.

Engaging the customer

The biggest advantage of using social Web sites, says Ed Reese, owner of Sixth Man Marketing, is to connect with your audience where they live.

“Social networking done right is like good business karma,” Reese says. “When you give, you get new clients and new connections, and you get new links.”

That’s why Kassi Davis, store manager at Marcella’s Bridal, launched a MySpace page for the store this summer.

Through the site, Marcella’s hopes to gain exposure to a younger generation of customers for both bridal wear and prom attire. But the difficulty, Davis says, is finding the time to manage the site.

“We should be putting way more pictures up. It is hard to focus on it,” she admits.

Joining too many sites or not maintaining them is a common challenge, experts say.