Educate yourself and the company team - Since we have more tools to be less reliant on a single webmaster the company website should be run as an intricate part of your business that requires project managers and teams to deliver the results, especially when dealing with a social network. Visit the giants like Facebook, Twitter, and MySpace. Create an account and explore the tools that are available.

Control the costs - Decide ahead of time who will create the newsletters, monitor the forums, manage the members and their questions before you bring a developer in. This will not only cut back on scope-creep, but it will also give your team some creating time of their own to provide as much useful tools that your customers want.  Remember, it's all about service, or at least it should be.  Speaking of service, what exactly are you providing your business community? The idea of launching a social site is great, but be prepared that it will start off slow and grow as long as you are providing something that your users will not only want to visit initially, but come back again and again.

Security Alerts - Any website has security concerns, but you have a whole new can of worms when you let users run your site - which is basically what the social network is all about. Investigating the legal issues and the user rules now will save you many headaches later. Don't forget to budget in security and software upgrades, on the surface it may seem like a long way off and something that happens infrequently.  And that may be the case with your current site.  However, once you start linking automatic newsletter sign-ups, uploads, downloads, group creation and member registration you will find that you will need to maintain your site at a higher level than previously.