Abstract
Gentle (2009) defines social media as “the use of web-based and mobile technologies to turn communication into an interactive dialogue”. Its popularity has been growing exponentially in the last few years. Among the most vibrant include twitter and facebook.
This paper addresses measuring the impact of social media by looking at challenges, practices and methods. Effects of social media can be felt from in communication, events, information access and management, as well as brand building and monitoring.
Social media web resource management is accomplished using different systems and techniques. This paper briefly analyzes Drupal,Joomla, Plone and siteforum. The analysis is done through degree centrality, betweenness centrality, network centralization and network reaches. As social medial gains popularity, more challenges arise.
These include information management, privacy, customer adoption, regulations and policy formulation, all addressed in this paper. Finally the paper concludes that social media is an e-commerce platform with significant benefits and cannot be ignored. The papers also presents recommendations based on the identified problems.
Introduction
“The term social media refers to the use of web-based and mobile technologies to turn communication into an interactive dialogue” (Gentle, 2009). Social media allows creation and exchange of content, particularly user-generated.
Its main purpose is to create interaction platforms, enabling scalability to various communication techniques. It further allows accessibility to various communication channels between organizations, communities and individuals. In every organization today, social media has substantial effect on how communication is carried implemented.
Social media today is in different forms including social blogs, wikis, podcasts, social bookmarking, pictures and videos, just to mention a few.
As Benkler (2006) researched, “there are six different types of social media namely; collaborative projects, blogs and micro-blogs, content communities, social networking sites, virtual game worlds and virtual social worlds”. The technologies differ but most of them can be integrated in social networking platforms.
The main features of social media arise from its level of accessibility, usability, permanence, immediacy and reachability (Shirky, 2008). Businesses and individuals are able to reach an audience for different purposes. For businesses, social media has created an ease of reaching a global audience. Social media is easily accessible to both the private organizations, as well as the public.
As opposed to the industrial media, where communication lag easily occurs, social media creates immediacy in communication. It allows change and editing of information as opposed to industrial media where permanence makes it hard to alter information once it has been released to the intended audience.
Effects of social media
Several surveys and studies reveal that social media plays a significant role in the economy and business trends in different regions. It also plays a significant role in the day-to-day lives of people. According to a survey conducted by the Nielsen Wire (2011), “social networking accounts for 22% of all the time spent online in the US”.
The same survey revealed that more than 230 million people in the United States use their mobile devices to access social media. This figure only represents those people above the age of 13. In 2009, Australians recorded the highest number of hours spent on social media. Over 9 million people in the region were on a social site an average of 9 hours per month.
While in the past social media was considered to be for the young, this trend is slowly changing and old people are embracing the trend. In 2010, the number social media users aged 65 years and above doubled. In the United States, it is approximated that one on every four people aged about the age of 65 uses social media.
The number of people registered in different social sites further proves the level of significance it has in people’s lives today. By June this year, facebook had already registered over 750 million users (Kincaid, 2011). From the following statistics, it is evident that social media is a phenomenon that cannot just be ignored. The effects can be analyzed in the following areas;
Communication
Social media plays a significant role in the way people communicate, what they communicate and when. If a business is able to survey and understand these trends, it is bound to benefit tremendously from the amount of exchange that takes place on social sites. For example, people are likely to discuss less serious issues in the evenings after work.
This might not be the best time for a business to try and introduce a discussion on more complex matters. Furthermore, many social media sites are created with simplicity in mind, a function that organizations should put into consideration as they try to interact with their audience.
Events
Event creation and management has become easier in the era of social media. Most social sites such as facebook allow for easy creation and management of events. Interaction with targeted participants makes it easy to gather feedback and work towards meeting everyone’s expectations. Whether it is a personal, professional of political event, the ease of getting people together through social media is evident.
Userability in events management is most evident in the entertainment and political arenas. Developers have today come up with functions is social media that allow constant updates and notification in the case that significant changes related to the event occur. This way, even forgetful and overly busy people are still up-to-date with the rest of the participants through notifications.
Information access and management
For business, easy access to information is probably the most significant benefit they have reaped from involving themselves in social media. The success of any business is highly dependent on their ability to disperse relevant about their products to the market, as well as get feedback on the same.
Social media has not only allowed this, but has also allowed organizations to sort out information before it reaches them. This is through functions such as liking or disliking a product available in some of the social media sites. This way, a business is able to make a quick conclusion over the customers’ reactions before analyzing the data in detail.
Brand building and monitoring
A significant advantage offered by the social media is how immediate feedback can be on a product. It is possible for an individual or organization to test a brand by exposing it to their audience in social media. It is also possible to influence opinion through social media by associating a product with fan activities in the internet.
Social media as a marketing tool has enable businesses to build their brands and manage their reputation to a global audience. Furthermore, it is possible to measure results arising social media though different measurement parameters.
One example of these measurement parameters is network analysis, which is “the study of social relations among a set of actors, characterized by a distinctive methodology encompassing techniques for collecting data, statistical analysis and visual representation, among others” (Bernoff and Li, 2008).
Social media web resource management
A content management system is done through different systems such as Drupal. “It is a free and open-source management system (CMS) and content management framework (CMF) written in PHP and distributed under the GNU (General Public License)” (VanDyk, 2008).
Through this system, users are able to register and create accounts. A developer is able to maintain the site and manage the menu. Through Drupal, it is also possible to customize layout and make system administration easier.
Another system used to manage content is Joomla. It is defined by Kafer and Emma (2009) as “free and open source content managing System (CMS) for publishing content on the World Wide Web and intranets and a model-view-controller (MVC) web application framework that can also be used independently”.
It is mostly applicable in data storage, managing a database, page caching, managing blogs, search services and internationalization of language. It can be installed via different platforms the most common being the Microsoft web installer.
Plone is a common management system is social media. “It is a free and open source content management system” (Kafer and Emma, 2009). It is used for different kinds of websites such as blogs and internal websites. It also used for internet sites and webshots. It is mostly preferred for its flexibility and adaptability. It enable easy work flow and offers very good security.
Furthermore, developers that use it commend it for flexibility and high usability. Plone features include collaboration and sharing, working copy support, inline editing, versioning, and graphic page editors, among others.
Another system that is gaining popularity in the recent past is Siteforum. This a software-as-a-service product offered by the Siteforum company in Germany. The software includes number functionalities such as virtual event and online marketing. It is used in social networking as a collaboration tool. The company offers the software as a hosting, storage and traffic model.
Its functions cover content management system and virtual events such as administration, intranet, online-shop, marketing and support. For businesses that use social media as a marketing tool, functions such as online marketing and customer relations management are significant.
Social network analysis
“Social network analysis (SNA) is the mapping and measuring of relationship and flows between people, groups, organizations, computers, URLs, and other connected information/knowledge entities” (Bernoff and Li, 2008).
The nodes represent the people while the links represent the relationship between individuals and/or groups. Experts and consultants in this field of study use SNA to understand organization and business networks analysis. This method of analysis can be used to understand social networking even at an individual level. Different concepts are used to understand social networking.
Degree centrality
“Social networking is analyzed using a degrees concept, which is used to understand the number of flows or connections between nodes” (VanDyk, 2008). The person or group with the most direct connections is considered as having the most active node.
When social networking is used for business, common wisdom interprets more connections as better. What matters in this analysis is where the connections lead to and the benefits of leading that way. Businesses for example only connect to others who are already connected.
Betweenness centrality
This measures the location of a node and its connectivity to the rest of the network. For example, being between important constituents makes one in an easily connectable location. A highly connected person or group located centrally can be said to play a broker role in the system and network.
“A node with high betweenness has great influence over what flows and what doesn’t in the network” (VanDyk, 2008). Such a node has control over the outcome of different connections attached to it. It also has visibility into the rest of the network.
Network Centralization
As Krebs (2011) explains, “individual network centralities provide insight into the individual’s location in the network and the relationship between the centralities of all nodes can reveal much about the overall network structure”. Such networks are dominated by few participants and activity is on a few nodes. Such connections are considered unstable since they can easily and abruptly fail if the main connection is removed.
Less centralized networks are considered most stable since they have no single point of failure. In the event of intentional attacks, they may survive since the attack’s point of entry is not centralized. This type of connection in social networking is also protected from random failures since the link is not on a specific node.
Network reach
Benkler (2006) argues that “not all paths are created equal and shorter paths are more important”. Tapscott and William (2006) further explain that “networks have horizons over which we cannot see, nor influence”. In any network, there are specific network paths which are critical and which we should pay attention to.
“It is therefore important for any business or individual to know who is on their network, who is in their neighborhood and who they can reach” (Tapscott and William, 2006). In social networking, connections happen through network integration, boundary spanners and peripheral players.
In network integration, “network metrics are often measured using geodesics or shortest paths which make the erroneous assumption that all information/influence flows along the network’s shortest paths only” (Tapscott and William, 2006). Social networking best happens via the shortest and most direct connections.
Being on many efficient paths is paramount since there are many different interpretations coming from different paths. This is particularly beneficial for those in business. It allows both local and distant information to travel around the network.
“In boundary spanners, nodes connecting their group to others usually end up with high network metrics” (Surowiecki, 2004). The spanners are more central in the network and allow a wider coverage than that within the local connection. The spanners should be well-connected to the central location since they have access to information from all the clusters in the network.
The information can be put together to form new products and services by the innovators. Finally, in peripheral players, the nodes are not considered as being very important. “Since individual networks overlap, peripheral nodes are connected to networks that are not currently mapped” (Krebs, 2011).
Participants in the network might have individual networks outside their company, a function that can be very resourceful in collecting fresh information from outside the company.
Challenges
Due to amount of information transacted through the social media, several challenges rise. The first significant challenge is consumer adoption. For many consumers, transition from tradition media to social sites presents a challenge. The change is particularly difficult for people aged 65 years and above.
The rate at which usability changes further makes it difficult for people who may not be able to catch up with new functions created each day. Even for young people, social media tends to favor people with an interest in technology.
Regulation, privacy and adoption present a significant challenge to the adoption of social media in different regions. Issues of privacy have been a source of heated debate among regulators, users and developers. Many sites require very personal information to register or sign is as a user.
The issues of regulation continue to spark battles between those designing the rules, those responsible for implementation and users. A good example of how regulation and privacy affect social media is China for dictating what citizens can share or not.
The third challenge is managing the amount of information transacted through social media platforms. Some organizations may find the amount of feedback from customers overwhelming. This is especially common among organizations that choose to use the social media but lack good information management capacity.
The nature of social media is in such a way that users expect a response to their questions or concerns almost immediately. This can be both tiring and expensive for an organization that lacks the technical capacity to create automatic response systems.
Conclusion
As explained in the beginning, social media allows creation and exchange of content, particularly user-generated. Its main purpose is to create interaction platforms, enabling scalability to various communication techniques.
The invention of social media platforms has allows easy access to communication channels in the internet, ease of accessing a global audience and overwhelming levels of interaction between people from all parts of the world. As the world warms up doing almost everything through the internet, social media presents an opportunity for business to stay relevant in an online world.
Managing social media websites and designs has created a competitive market in the area of innovations. Most common managing systems include Drupal,Joomla, Plone and Siteforum. The need to create a vibrant environment is social media means that more are being created each day.
The effects can be analyzed through various parameters such as degree of centrality, betweenness centrality, network centralization and network reaches. As innovations and applications become more complex, so do challenges. Major headaches for developers and users include privacy, policies and regulation. For businesses, inflow of information may be overwhelming, making it hard to manage.
In conclusion, social media today has major influence in how e-commerce is conducted and how its direction of growth. The trends are exciting and vibrant, making it hard to predict how much more influence it will have in businesses and lives in future.
Recommendations
The world today can be considered as an ‘online world’ where people shop, learn, talk, work and even travel online. As this happens, businesses, organizations, individuals, governments and consumers stand to gain many things. Therefore, it is important that each of these people be strategically placed to reap the benefits of being able to reach the rest of the world easily.
Internet marketing as well as online media campaigns and buys are the new trends in the business world. For players in the market to fully benefit, “it is important for them to build their network or community when they use social media tools, and it is equally important to maintain that community if they really want to benefit from social media use” (Peacock, 2008).
Challenges arising are many, but can be resolved if all the major stakeholders such as governments, investors and consumers are involved. Governments should find means and ways of supporting positive developments in social media rather than restricting utilization.
Users have a responsibility of ensuring that they use social media responsibly by protecting themselves from security challenges that may arise from participation in different functions. It is also important that businesses use their position positively.
Using their position and technological advantages to hurt customers should be prohibited by the law and avoided by business. This is particularly important in the way they use personal information made available to them by their customers. Governments through regulations need to ensure that every stakeholder is protected.
Reference List
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Krebs, V.,2011. Social network analysis: A brief introduction. Web.
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Nielsen Wire, 2011. Social networks/blogs now account for one in every four and a half minutes online. Web.
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