The Affects of Social Network on the Modern Business Environment

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The affects of social network on the modern business environment

Business

By Masoud Sadeghizadeh
Spring quarter 2010
Final paper by Doctor Paul

Contents

Abstract P 3
Introduction P 3
Definition of social networks P 4
The effect of social networks within business environment P 5
Business risks of social networking P 5
Business benefits of social networking P 6
Marketing, the biggest reason of deploying social networks P 7
Social networking sites growth in marketing P 8
Further development of networking websites in the future P 9
Conclusion P 11
References P 12

Abstract:

Social networks tools are used as a means of building links to business websites where an online social networking has been harnessed as an invaluable asset for many corporate businesses. Due to the big majority personal use of social networks today is forcing enterprises to leaders to effectively connect with staffs and customers, and sometimes to keep an eye on the competition. In this paper we conducted on how the corporate companies are recognizing that there is an opportunity to use internal social networks to motivate and retain talented employees, tap the
Most relevant expertise, enhances collaboration, and ultimately improves organizational performance and business profits. It is also analyzes how web-based networking platforms similar to Facebook, Twitter, Flicker, MySpace, YouTube and LinkedIn give this opportunity to the personal business network online and gives access to people, jobs and careers like never before. As such, enterprises can now make best use to these social network tools by exploiting the vast amount of personal information it holds on their market research databases.

Introduction:

Social networks are groups of individuals who share their opinions with each other. Their popular bond of social networks may be the community in which members share their religion, subdivision, career interest, social interests, and common friends or shared beliefs. As a summery, social networks can arise from nearly any commonality or even a desire to make friends among their individual members. These social networks has become a source of many scholars based on communities and researchers in a number of topics such as privacy and identity and the capital of communities and adolescents use depends not only upon the social networks of friends and the link between the people but there are network-makers and business owners and employees, and months on the example site to destroy that, which brought together more than 20 million users and more than 150 different craft. And from those social networks, the user can write his autobiography in the field of education and work, and can invite friends to commend it to others to start new areas of work with each other, so those networks is one of the areas that are away from the future of large social network, the major conflict in the first days, social networks were also used as a means of building links to business websites – an important search engine optimization technique. How eve adjustments that make these links worthless for search ranking improvements. Still, such links can bring increased traffic to a website. Although traditionally, social networks were made up of people who might gather face-to-face, today 's social networks are predominately online. As an example of today social networks include social networking sites, such as LinkedIn, Facebook, MySpace and others. With increase of mobile phone usage and enhanced cell phone technology, even Twitter might be considered a social network of sorts where you can let your network of friends know what you are doing or thinking at any given moment. Today 's social networks are free to join, which makes them extremely popular. Today, CEOs all around the world are considering and implementing strategies to create business value from the use of social networking tools. It is clear that every large organization is at some stage of considering and grappling with the issues raised by online social networking. Some companies are focused on whether to block external social networks, whereas others are proactively exploring using these tools for applications including project collaboration, recruitment, learning and development, and other business applications. In this paper we try to find how the social networks help business, its impact on corporate business performance, we based our research to some selected companies and services enterprises in Malaysia such Proton, Cleome, TM, J-Biotech and Inter-Pacific Securities. The research was based on six social networking like Face-book, LinkedIn, MySpace, Twitter, Flicker and YouTube. The rest of the paper is prepared as follows section 2 focuses on the related work, section 3 is Data Analysis and finding, we then draw our conclusion in section5.

Definition of Social Network:

Social networking is a way in which individuals can find a way to find others with common interests and allow them to “meet” online. It has been around as long as the Internet itself. It has taken various forms – some of the more popular in the 1980s include bulletin board services, such as Fido Net, and the rise of the popular online services, e.g. CompuServe, Prodigy, and AOL, each of which developed forums in which their members could reach one another (Graham et al 2008).

The effects of social network within business environment:
Absolutely, using the social networks as a great facility might have some advantages and also some disadvantages, just like other thing. In following, I am going to explain the impacts and benefits of using social networks within business environment.

Business risks of social networking:

1) Productivity losses:
a) Addictive and time-consuming.
b) Over-use during work time is a genuine issue.
c) Can actually increase the productivity and effectiveness for some roles.

2) Legal risks
a) Generally employers can monitor their employees’ web use and email, but notice is needed. Can result in legal liability.
b) Potential for legal liability due to customer actions.

3) Reputation risk
a) A risk to the business’s reputation.
b) Many examples of gaffes & negative comments.
c) Difficult to remove the comments.

4) Viruses and spyware
a) Frequently a platform for malicious attacks using viruses and spyware.

5) Privacy breaches and identity theft
a) Can promote identity theft, even where private.
b) Third party applications usually get access to data.

6) Social engineering
a) Use online information to commit targeted acts of fraud.
b) Could profess to be the assistant to a high-level staff member, and know enough internal’ information to convince a staff member to provide cheques or goods.
c) Convincing identity cards/business cards used to gain access to the business or its customers.
d) Grandparent fraud.

7) Inadvertent release of information
a) Windows into the lives of users.
b) Unintentional release
c) LinkedIn shows your network your recent connections – who are probably prospective clients.
d) Using an online wiki to collaborate with a client (or even to track tasks and manage projects) may result in the release of confidential client information.

Business benefits of social networking:

Social networking may sound fluffy, but it can translate into real benefits for the companies too. William Baker, a professor of marketing at San Diego State University, surveyed 1,600 executives and found that firms that rely heavily on external social networks scored 24 percent higher on a measure of radical innovation than companies that do not. Online networks can help to hire the right people, market your product or even find a manufacturer. Here are four professionals that might bring huge benefits through the organizations:

1) Finding Unexpected Collaborators:
There are a lot of people who have found a really useful collaborator while they were discussing about a topic inside one of these social networks. Finding these types of collaborators might bring a fantastic improvement through their business as well.

2) Building a Global Business from Scratch:
This is also a reality in social networks to be connected to the other people with brilliant ideas that might spark something new in your mine. Social networks can be considered as the worlds of different ideas that can be really helpful to even create a new idea.

3) Finding Talent in the Trenches:
It is also another benefit of using social networks for the people who are looking for someone or an A-player to hire for their companies. It can be done easily and through an online connection on the internet. People can find genius people for themselves as well.

4) Viral Marketing on the Cheap:
It is also not going to cost users even a Cent to market their products and services. That is a great opportunity for the people who want to expand their business globally but extremely cheap. This is also an absolute point that nobody can be disagree with.

Marketing, the biggest reason of deploying social networks:

I believe that marketing is the most important type of business activities. It does not really matter what kind of business or services the companies are advertising on the internet but the most important issue is the number of visitors. Marketing has become the most important part of social networks today because that is too hard to gather people on the internet to advertise some products for example. Knowledge and information can be shared through these social networks and that is what has made such a stiff competitive market place over there.

Social networking of the companies is being done based on just 3 factors:
1) Build their brand and promote their products or services.
2) Improve communications and collaboration.
3) Increase consumer engagement.

Social Networking Sites Growth in Marketing:
As these networks growing, marketers view this medium as a potential tool for marketing communications. This could increase the number of people visiting social networking Web sites. In a survey (Marshall Kirkpatrick 2006) social networking Web sites have experienced a spurt of growth in their number of visitors.
As the time spending on social networking Web sites increase, lots of companies are now paying much attention to marketing on social media. In a research Suzanne Veronica, (2007), predicts that between 2007 and 2011, U.S. spending time on social networks will grow 180% from $900 million to $2.5 billion. Dinah (2007) started that there are hundreds of social network sites, with various technological affordances, supporting a wide range of interests and practices. As their key technological features are consistent, the cultures that appear around social network sites are varied. Many sites support the pre-existing social networks maintenance, but others help
Strangers connect based on shared interests, political news, or activities.
Krista 2009 named some of the important social networking sites. However, this is a dynamic area that there are bound to be new ones emerging, merging or disappearing in all time. Trust is the one of the main factor expected in every social networking.

Further development of networking websitse in the future: As the human knowledge in every field of science have been growing extremely fast, a huge number of networking plans are being released to keep the business improvement at the incredible stage. In this part of my research I am going to describe some extensions in social networking that would be appeared in the near future.

Decentralized architecture for social networks and data portability:
It is arguing that forcing users to create accounts and record their data across many of these networks was counter-productive, and prevented the establishment of innovative services.
A decentralized architecture for social networks would allow the user to choose how many accounts and profiles she desires, and to use any of these on any social networks which would support the proposed or user-selected features.
Business models considerations:
The workshop participants considered the general question of sustainable business models for social networks as a way to detect possible obstacles to the maturation of the social networking industry, and with the goal of identifying possible opportunities for collaboration among actors (social network operators, service providers, telecommunication operators, etc.) on solving these issues.

Obviously, many different business models have been successfully deployed in social networks, including, among others:
a) Subscription fees for end-users - although that option was noted as often difficult to set up,
b) Advertising,
c) Broker for communities sharing similar interests,
d) Access to premium content or services.
There isn 't a single sustainable business model, and there are probably still many new business models that will be invented based on the new value that social networks bring, i.e. the increased communication channels between trusted or similar-minded people. In particular, the potential business value communities provide by reducing the cost of establishing trust between agents seem to open the way for a lot of innovative markets.

Privacy and trust:
The participants strongly agreed that social networking technologies needed to preserve the possibility for a user to fragment its identity across various profiles, and, in an increasingly context-sensitive setting, to hide, blur or lie about the user 's current context, as a minimal option to protect privacy.
Some of the presentations highlighted technical solutions to establish trust and privacy boundaries among social networks participants, even in a decentralized architecture. But the difficulty of getting users to recognize the privacy-implications of their behavior on social networks, and to understand and define access control policies around these behaviors was found to stand as a great obstacle to the deployment of any technical solution. As a potential way forward, some participants expressed interest in creating guidelines and tutorials targeted at social network users.
Some of the discussions evoked the possibility of creating a code of ethics or privacy best practices targeted at social network operators, but many people warned that the difference among legislation, cultures, and usage context (business relations, intranet, family connections) would make that exercise difficult if at all possible.
Social web interoperability incubator group:
Creation of a Social Web Interoperability Incubator Group (or a taskforce in a larger Social Web Incubator Group) to review and map existing data formats and protocols used for interoperability among social networks, identify potential gaps.

Micro payment incubator group:
Creation of a Micro Payments Incubator Group to explore the opportunity of restarting work on a micro payments protocol in W3C to facilitate the business development of social networks.

Social web best practices incubator group:
Creation of Social Web Best Practices Incubator Group (or a taskforce in a larger Social Web Incubator Group) to explore the opportunity to develop privacy guidelines for social networks operators, and privacy tutorials for social networks users.

W3C policy languages interest group (PLING):
Informing the W3C Policy Languages Interest Group (PLING) of the findings of the workshop participants in terms of privacy risks in social networks, and of the possible need for a P3P extension more adapted to the emergence of new user interactions in social networking.

Access control ontology:
Exploring the opportunity to standardize an access control ontology to facilitate the establishment of privacy boundaries in a distributed social networking environment.

Based on recent analysis the effective extensions in the above matters can definitely make the social networks safer and more attractive places of business environment.

Conclusion:
However, there are some impacts in getting social networks used in the business environment but there are also some great advantages in using them that we need to consider about. In my opinion it is not right to ban using these networks at all but an accurate limitation should be executed based on the type of business we are running. The point is that the business world is getting expanded improved on the internet and all the companies should pay attention to this event otherwise they might be the big losers I think. The only issue is that we must increase our knowledge to create new networking model to decline its impact’s effects.

References:
1) Jake swearingen, Sep 5, 2008. Social networking for business. Available at: http://www.bnet.com/article/social-networking-for-business/219914

2) Kwanghui Lim & Brian C, 2010. The effects of social networks and contractual characteristics on the relationship between venture capitalists and entrepreneurs. Available at: http://kwanghui-public.s3.amazonaws.com/lim-cu-apjm2010.pdf

3) Jeff Bullas, (Unknown).12 key findings on social media’s impact on business and decision making by CEO’s and managers.
Available at: http://www.jeffbullas.com/2010/04/05/12-key-findings-on-social-media%E2%80%99s-impact-on-business-and-decision-making-by-ceos-and-managers/

4) Michael Wagner, (2007). The companies are using business social networking. Available at: http://www.wipplaw.com/business-social-networking.html

5) Boyd D. M. & Ellison, N. B. (2007). Social network sites: Definition, history, and scholarship. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication
Available at: http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol13/issue1/boyd.ellison.htm.

6) Facebook Adds Marketplace of Classified Ads (2007-05-12) available at: www.physorg.com/news98196557.html.

7) Graham et al (2008). Corporate business make money.
Available at: http://www.tcf-nj.org/2008/TCF-paper.pdf.

8) Aimee Sway, March 31, 2011. Social networking for business. Available at: http://www.pronetadvertising.com/articles/social-networking-for-business.html

References: 1) Jake swearingen, Sep 5, 2008. Social networking for business. Available at: http://www.bnet.com/article/social-networking-for-business/219914 2) Kwanghui Lim & Brian C, 2010 Available at: http://www.jeffbullas.com/2010/04/05/12-key-findings-on-social-media%E2%80%99s-impact-on-business-and-decision-making-by-ceos-and-managers/ 4) Michael Wagner, (2007) Available at: http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol13/issue1/boyd.ellison.htm. 6) Facebook Adds Marketplace of Classified Ads (2007-05-12) available at: www.physorg.com/news98196557.html. 7) Graham et al (2008) Available at: http://www.tcf-nj.org/2008/TCF-paper.pdf. 8) Aimee Sway, March 31, 2011