ERATO CHRISTOU

DD3000
Contextual Studies – Design Futures
Brief
Based on an issue related to your discipline of study, undertake a thorough investigation of your chosen subject. We want you to look into your own fashion future and predict what area of knowledge may assist your future practice. For example an exploration into:
Fashion Promotion
Trend Prediction
Advertising Trends
New methods in Promotion
Social Media
Ethical Packaging Design
Fashion Design
Trend forecasting
Legal requirements for fire retarding lampshades
Colour predictions
Precision engineered sporting fabrics
Sustainability and textiles
Manufacturing issues
How the methods/ideas you apply in the studio could be affected by social issues, financial implications, political decisions, ecological issues, new technologies and now and in the future?
Depending on your area of study, the future might mean very different things. The objective of this module is to embrace the present but have a truly creative vision of ‘what might be’.
Your research, arguments and final scenario should be represented in a conclusive, image-rich document which represents a compelling narrative of your exploration. Use this research opportunity wisely – think about what you need to know and understand in the workplace you are about to enter.

Assessment
The document should represent a personalised presentation of your thoughts and findings regarding the possible future you have explored. Whilst the format and method of physical presentation is entirely up to you, please understand that the layout of contained information
MUST conform to the structural format listed below:
1.Title page
2.Contents page
3.An introduction to your chosen field of study
4.A prediction of outcomes/aims
5.An overview of the future context
6.An investigation of the chosen specialist field/unravelling the facts
7.A conclusion – research findings and trend/design proposals
8.Appendices
9.Bibliography

PROJECT: SOCIAL MEDIA and SOCIAL NETWORKING
STUDENT NAME: ERATO-LYDIA CHRISTOU
COURSE: DD3000
TUTOR: GOGO PROVATIDOU
26 MARCH 2015

Definitions
Social Media is a two word term that is heard a lot during the last years. Even though many people talk, interact or write for or to social media, there seems to be a dispute of a formal definition of this term. To make things easier, we could probably break down the term into its two components, social and media. Media is an tool or an instrument of communication. By media we mainly refer to radio broadcasts, newspapers, TV etc. Therefore social media can be defined as an instrument of communication that wants to be socially infused and therefore disseminated to people. Bringing the term back to the reality it represents today, social media refer to the media created ie article, photos etc, in order to share with other people. The term social media is erroneously interrelated with social networking. These two terms are not the same but can be complimentary to each other. Social networking is about engagement. That means that by social networking the author, creator or user of the media wants to share, communicate and may want to follow his/her audience reactions on that. Networking is about creating relationships, communicating with the readers, building your following and connecting with the online audience you are approaching.
Historical evolution
Since the development of the world wide web, there were a few efforts to create social networking sites. The first well known social networking sites were Geocities in 1994 and Tripod in 1995.
Many of these early communities focused on bringing people together to interact with each other through chat rooms. Later on and more specifically in the late 1990s new features started emerging in social networking sites, such as managing friends, or developing your own on-line profile.
Friendster in 2002 was one of the leaders with such features which was then followed by MySpace and LinkedIn. The most well known and widely used social networking site as we know it today was Facebook, which was launched in 2004 initially, as a Harvard social networking site and then expanded throughout the world.

Advantages of using social networking sites
As with everything new, there are advantages and disadvantages of using social networking sites. In this section we shall give an overview of the main advantages of their use.
Public on-line profile: through social networking sites, you have the ability to create your own on-

line profile which might or might not reflect your real-life personal profile. This identity creation can serve many purposes as to the image you want to reflect and the audience you want to target.
Friends / audience: The main aim of social networking sites is being followed and be able to follow others. Through those sites, you may or may not be able to identity friends and people you want to follow and be followed. You create a network of people and a network of new virtual friends. These virtual friends then have the possibility of becoming real friends or not. Moreover you have the chance to find old friends that you have lost over the years.

Dissemination: Being part of a social network your audience is much larger than just staying in the confined limits of your own region, town. If you want to raise awareness about something or want to disseminate information or just to make yourself or your work known, then you have bigger chances of getting that out there quicker and efficiently.

Niche networks: There are some niche networks that can provide you with knowledge, views, friends on that niche sector. Ie there are social networks to learn a foreign language and through those networks you have the possibility of exchanging questions, practicing your new skills or even learning more.

Learn on what is of interest: By following people and creating friends, you are able to learn gossip or news of what is of interest to you. In that way, you do not have to buy a whole newspaper for example of read a whole blog if its of no interest to you. You can just read the pieces of news that is of interest to you.

Immediacy: The time between creating a piece of news and communication it in traditional media such as newspapers, radio etc, can be quite lengthy. On the other hand, social networking sites make this time lag very short. There is an immediacy of the communication

Disadvantages of using social networking sites:
In this section we list some of the disadvantages related to the use of social networking sites.

Trustworthiness: There is always the lack of trustworthiness with social media, as there are not a few occasions that you do not know who the author is or even how trustworthy the source of information is. Moreover, some elements of your personal life might be exposed by others and that makes social media lack the element of trustworthiness.

Time: more and more time is spend on interacting in social media. That isolates us more from real people and make us more distant from face to face interactions. The face to face communication skills are also deteriorating and thus our ability to interact in social situations are becoming more awkward. Isolation: Due to the time spend on social media, people tend to isolate themselves, looking at their phones, tablets or Pcs in order to interact in their virtual word. More specifically in the 2012 report by Nielsen, it is stated that internet users continue to spend more time with social media sites than any other type of site. At the same time, the total time spent on social media in the U.S. across PC and mobile devices increased by 99 percent to 121 billion minutes in July 2012 compared to 66 billion minutes in July 2011.

Killing tradition: What is called traditional social media is decreasing in value and readability. Since the social networking sites provide more immediate information, the traditional media seem old fashioned and not immediate enough.

Easily exposed vulnerable groups: With the use of iphones, smart phones and androids, more vulnerable groups are using social media. Even though all that exposure to information and new people might be beneficial to some, that know how to evaluate that wealth of information and people, there are some groups of people that are not aware of the dangers that they might be exposed to, or they are not able to manage those dangers. These vulnerable groups are children and mentally impaired people.

The lists of advantages and disadvantages is not exhaustive but rather indicative. It is also worth

bearing in mind that any of these elements that are stated either as an advantage or as a disadvantage can be turned upside down, depending on the usage.

A brief description of the most popular social networking / social media sites.
There are many and diverse social networking sites but in this section we will only mention a few popular ones, with no specific order.
Facebook. Its an onlinesocial network with its main offices in California, USA. Its website was launched on the 4th of February 2004, by Mark Zuckerberg with his college roommates and fellow students, at Harvard University.
After registering to use the site, users can create a user profile, add other users as friends, exchange messages, post status updates and photos, share videos and receive notifications when others update their profiles. Additionally, users may join common-interest user groups, organized by workplace, school or college, or other characteristics, and categorize their friends into lists such as "People
From Work" or "Close Friends".
Facebook is one of the most popular social networking site. In the graph below we give the popularity of the site in numbers.

(source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook)
As we can see from the graph above, active users of Facebook increased from just a million in 2004 to over 1100 million in 2013.

Twitter Twitter was created in March 2006 by Jack Dorsey, Evan Williams, Biz Stone and Noah
Glass. It was launched in July 2006. Its an online social networking site that allows users to send and read short texts of 140 characters in total, called "tweets". Registered users can read and post tweets, but unregistered users can only read them. Twitter Inc. is based in San Francisco, USA and has more than 25 offices around the world.

LinkedIn. It was founded in December 2002 and launched on May 5, 2003, it is mainly used for professional networking. It is a business-oriented social network. In 2006, LinkedIn had 20 million members. As of June 2013, LinkedIn reports more than 259 million acquired users in more than 200 countries and territories.
LinkedIn allows users (workers and employers) to create profiles and "connections" to each other in an online social network which may represent real-world professional relationships. Users can

invite anyone (whether a site user or not) to become a connection.
Instagram. Instagram was created by Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger, and launched in October
2010. It is an online phto and video sharing social network, that enables its users to take pictures and videos, and share them on a variety of social networking platforms, such as Facebook, Twitter,
Flickr etc. A distinctive feature is that it confines photos to a square shape, in contrast to the 4:3 spect ration typically used by mobile device cameras. Users can also apply digital filters to their images. The maximum duration for Instagram videos is 15 seconds.
The service rapidly gained popularity, with over 100 million active users as of April 2012 and over
300 million as of December 2014.
Academia. It is a social network website for academics. It was launched in September 2008 and the site now has over 16 million registered users. The platform can be used to share papers, monitor their impact, and follow the research in a particular field. Academia.edu was founded by Richard
Price.
YouTube. It's a video sharing website, that its registered offices are situated in San Bruno,
California. The service was created by three former Paypal employees in February 2005. In
November 2006, it was bought by Google for US$1.65 billion.
Busuu is the world's largest social network for language learning. It offers free and premium paidfor access to audio-visual courses for 12 languages. The site left the testing beta in February 2009, and moved to a freemium business model. As of April 2014, a single month's premium membership cost €14.99, with reductions for longer-term subscriptions

There are many more social networking sites that have similar characteristics to the above and also provide different elements. The interesting thing about social networking sites as we see from the above brief description, is that there are many sites that offer specific services to specific sector of interest. In an article by Kietzmann et al., (2011), present a framework that defines social media by using seven functional building blocks:
·Identity: This block represents the extent to which users reveal their identities in a social media setting. This can include disclosing information such as name, age, gender, profession, location, and also information that portrays users in certain ways.
·Conversations: This block represents the extent to which users communicate with other users in a social media setting. Many social media sites are designed primarily to facilitate conversations

among individuals and groups. These conversations happen for all sorts of reasons. People tweet, blog, et cetera to meet new like-minded people, to ?nd true love, to build their self-esteem, or to be on the cutting edge of new ideas or trending topics. Yet others see social media as a way of making their message heard and positively impacting humanitarian causes, environmental problems, economic issues, or political debates.
·Sharing: This block represents the extent to which users exchange, distribute, and receive content.
The term ‘social’ often implies that exchanges between people are crucial. In many cases, however, sociality is about the objects that mediate these ties between people—the reasons why they meet online and associate with each other.
·Presence: This block represents the extent to which users can know if other users are accessible. It includes knowing where others are, in the virtual world and/or in the real world, and whether they are available.
·Relationships: This block represents the extent to which users can be related to other users. Two or more users have some form of association that leads them to converse, share objects of sociality, meet up, or simply just list each other as a friend or fan.
·Reputation: This block represents the extent to which users can identify the standing of others, including themselves, in a social media setting. Reputation can have different meanings on social media platforms. In most cases, reputation is a matter of trust, but because information technologies are not yet good at determining such highly qualitative criteria, social media sites rely on
‘mechanical Turks’: tools that automatically aggregate user-generated information to determine trustworthiness. ·Groups: This block represents the extent to which users can form communities and sub communities. The more ‘social’ a network becomes, the bigger the group of friends, followers, and contacts. Social Media and Business
Although traditional social media offer a variety of opportunities for companies , Economic Sector mobile social media makes use of the location- and time-sensitivity aspects of it in order to engage into marketing research, communication, sales promotions/discounts, and relationship development/loyalty programs. In the bullet points below you'll find five advantages of its use according to Kaplan (2012).
·Marketing research: Mobile social media applications offer data about offline consumer

movements at a level of detail heretofore limited to online companies. Any firm can now know the exact time at which a customer entered one of its outlets, as well as comments made during the visit. ·Communication: Mobile social media communication takes two forms, the first of which is company-to-consumer in which a company may establish a connection to a consumer based on its location and provide reviews about locations nearby. The second type of communication is usergenerated content. For example, McDonald's offered $5 and $10 gift cards to 100 users randomly selected among those checking in at one of the restaurants. This promotion increased check-ins by
33% (from 2,146 to 2,865), resulted in over 50 articles and blog posts, and prompted several hundred thousand news feeds and Twitter messages.
·Sales promotions and discounts: Although in the past customers had to use printed coupons, mobile social media allows companies to tailor promotions to specific users at specific times. For example, when launching its California-Cancun service, Virgin America offered users who checked in through Loopt at one of three designated Border Grill taco trucks in San Francisco and Los Angeles between 11 am and 3 pm on August 31, 2010, two tacos for $1 and two flights to Mexico for the price of one.
·Relationship development and loyalty programs: In order to increase long-term relationships with customers, companies are able to create loyalty programs that allow customers who check-in regularly at a location to earn discounts or perks. For example, American Eagle Outfitters remunerates such customers with a tiered 10%, 15%, or 20% discount on their total purchase
·E-commerce: Mobile social media applications such as Amazon.com and Pinterest are influencing an upward trend in the popularity and accessibility of e-commerce, or online purchases.
According to the Nielsen Company's report "The U.S. Digital Consumer Report", almost half (47%) of smart phone owners visit social networks every day via mobile applications. With the rapid adoption of mobile devices, social media has a symbiotic relationship with the mobile consumer.

Usage and business
According to an article written by Scott Hebner, there are more than two billion social connections generating more than three billion expressions per day. Overall, the use of social networking is 94% of people to learn, 78% to share knowledge and 49% to access needed expertise. There is a wealth of data generated. eMarketer says there are 1.73 billion using social networks and the number will rise to 2.55 billion by 2017. In fact, 90 percent of all data was created in just the past two years.

Our global economy has become a knowledge economy. The strength of this collective knowledge enables all of us to rapidly find answers to our questions, act with greater confidence, and influence others in entirely new ways. It’s clear that our world is experiencing a societal and economic force never seen before.
What does all of this social activity mean for business? There are three trends emerging:
1) Social networking is he new “production line” for business.
Nowadays, people can use social tools to collaborate and learn directly from the marketplace. The era where people were tied in their desks is long gone. Everyone in business is using social tools in order, to buy, sell, connect, share, launch etc. Its the new fastest and more efficient way of dissemination. Social businesses that embrace this phenomenon are able to build expertise by making knowledge more accessible; fuel innovation by crowd sourcing ideas; improve productivity with better collaboration; and expand customer sales, loyalty and advocacy by providing exceptional digital experiences. 2) Social creates a human face to the data.
By that huge amount of data generated and being out there, customers and employees can make better, more confident decisions. It can also help to better understand and address behavioural, social sentiment or performance-based trends.
HR executives are using social networking analytics to spot gaps in expertise and connect with job seekers to fill them. Companies can re-invent the way that they recruit, motivate and retain the best talent by using behavioural sciences, social analytics and comparative benchmarks. In other words, replacing gut-instinct guesswork with evidence-based decisions and behavioural sciences with big data, personalized at every touch point, customers and employees can make better, more confident decisions. Such analysis can also help to better understand and address behavioural, social sentiment or performance-based trends.

3) Social is the future
Because of the interactive and fast and efficient status, social businesses are responsive, agile and most importantly, transparent and authentic. The best examples are creating a culture of mutual respect, guided by social governance policies that employees understand and comply with.

Companies that are not taking advantage of social tools and technologies are already falling behind, and this trend will only accelerate. Instead of just pushing messages out to people, successful businesses are becoming social businesses. They are creating dynamic connections and personalized experiences that pull people in by means of social networks, which define and deliver the information and value to customers. And they are constantly analyzing and improving the way that they are transforming themselves to become even more successful.

Why using social media marketing for business
There is no doubt that marketing professionals now believe that exposure of the business in the social media networking sites is quite crucial. That might be because it is increasing exposure to the product or company. Moreover the traffic is being increased. By exposing the product, service or company, you might develop loyal fans and followers that want to keep informed about what you are posting.
Another advantage if the exposure, is that you increase your chances for more and better collaborations with other businesses. That is because people are informed of your strategies and products and thus can be better informed about your line of business. There is not need for further or extensive traditional marketing in order to make your product known. That decreases the costs, as digital marketing is mainly free of charge or of lower cost.
By promoting in social media you can also raise awareness about what you or your company is advocating and you can also influence more easily the public opinion. It also demonstrates your awareness and expertise in the field.
Last but not least, social media and social networking for businesses is a quick, immediate, efficient and effective way of communicating, sharing and disseminating ideas or information. Its a new and efficient way of spreading the word and the work of your company and raise awareness. Its the modern way of creating a loyal clientele, or creating new one and thus a new way of selling and busying in the broader sense.

Epilogue
As with everything technologically new, social media have advantages and disadvantages and its usage determines its outcome. There are different internet networking sites that serve different purposes and reach out to different audiences. There are also more general social networking sites

that are widely popular in many people.
Individuals as well as companies have to make a careful selection of their media source as well as to publish and read safely. Likewise with the traditional media such as newspapers, radio stations etc, the advertisers, or the blogger etc should be careful as how to present himself or his company to that new media source. By using internet social media you have the potential of attracting and being connected with million of people and therefore everything has to be done according to a good business plan or according to careful consideration.
Social media and social networking sites, made our lives different from what they used to be. Now information is readily available and people can exchange views, ideas or opinions in a blink of an eye. Therefore knowing how to properly use them is essential.

BIBLIOGRAPHY USED:

1. "State of the media: The social media report 2012". Featured Insights, Global, Media +
Entertainment. Nielsen. Retrieved 9 December 2012
2. H. Kietzmann, Jan; Kristopher Hermkens (2011). "Social media? Get serious! Understanding the functional building blocks of social media". Business Horizons 54: 241–251.

3. Kaplan, Andreas M. (March–April 2012). "If you love something, let it go mobile: Mobile marketing and mobile social media 4x4". Business Horizons 55 (2): 129–139. doi:10.1016/j.bushor.2011.10.009 4. Scott Hebner (2014) http://www.forbes.com/sites/ibm/2013/11/04/teaching-ibms-watson-how-tothink-like-a-human/