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The Impact of Social Network on Some

Selected Corporate Business

Mohmed Y. Mohmed1 1

Faculty of computer science and information systems Universiti Teknologi Malaysia 81310 Skudai Johor Bahru

mohutm@gmail.com1 Azizah Abdul. Rahman 2

2

Faculty of computer science and information systems Universiti Teknologi Malaysia 81310 Skudai Johor Bahru

azizahar@utm.my2

 

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 widespread personal use of social networks today is forcing organizations to leaders to effectively connect with employees 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 attract and retain talented staff, tap the most relevant expertise, enhance collaboration, and ultimately improve organizational performance and business outcomes. It is also analyzes how web-based networking platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, Myspace, Youtube and Linkedin allow the personal business network online and gives access to people, jobs and opportunities like never before. As such, corporate businesses 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.

Keywords: social network1; corporate business2; Impact study3.

1. Introduction

Social networks are groups of individuals who share a commonality. Their common bond of social networks may be the community in which members live, their religion, subdivision, career interest, social interests, and common friends or shared beliefs. In short, 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 study of many scholars in the field of 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 is a network-makers and business owners and employees, and months on the example site to ruin that, which brought together more than 20 million users and more than 150 different craft. And through those 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.

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adjustments that make these links worthless for search ranking improvements. Still, such links can bring increased traffic to a website.

While traditionally, social networks were made up of people who might gather face-to-face, today's social networks are predominately online. Examples of today's social networks include social networking sites, such as LinkedIn, Facebook, MySpace and others. With increasing mobile phone popularity 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 predominately free to join, which makes them extremely popular. Today, senior executives 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 limit our research to some selected manufacturing and services companies in Malaysia such Proton, Celcom, TM, J-Biotech and Inter-Pacific Securities. The research was conducted based on six social networking like Face-book, LinkedIn, MySpace, Twitter, Flickr and YouTube. The rest of the paper is organized as follows section 2 focuses on the related work, section 3 is Data Analysis and finding, we then draw our conclusion in section5.

2. Related Work

Recently there has been a great deal of interest in research involving social networks, including both modeling and analyzing the networks. A social network describes actors and their relationships in some cases, events and actors’ participation. A social network can be characterized by its relational structure; the underlying graph structure of the network dictates the structural properties. These include the density of the graph and average degree of the nodes to the measure of centrality and information flow. Most of the research in social networks has focus on structural aspects of the networks (Louis 2005).

2.1 Definition of Social Network

Social networking is the use of the Internet to enable individuals 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).

2.2 Social Networking Sites Growth in Marketing

As social networks grow, marketers view this medium as a potential tool for marketing communications. This increases the number of people visiting 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, most companies are now paying much attention to marketing on social media. In a survey Suzanne Vranica, (2007), predicts that between 2007 and 2011, U.S. spending on social networks will grow 180% from $900 million to $2.5 billion. Danah (2007) started that there are hundreds of social network sites, with various technological affordances, supporting a wide range of interests and practices. While their key technological features are fairly consistent, the cultures that emerge around social network sites are varied. Most sites support the maintenance of pre-existing social networks, but others help strangers connect based on shared interests, political views, or activities.

Krista (2009) listed some of the key social networking sites. However, this is such 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. ..

2.3 Trust and Privacy in Social Network Sites

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2.4 Social Network Sites at Work

The first type is general social network sites that are open to the public for registration, e.g., Facebook. The second type is enterprise social network site that is internal to the particular corporate and thus only open to its employees, e.g., IBM Beehive DiMicco et al (2008). Social network service has been defined by many scholars.

2.5 Social Network Services

Boyd & Ellison (2007) defined social network service as " Social networking services can be broadly defined as internet- or mobile-based social spaces designed to facilitate communication, collaboration, and content sharing across networks of contacts."

2.6 Online Social Networking

Christopher (2008) mentioned that "Online social networking has been around in various forms for nearly a decade, and has begun to achieve wide notice in the past few years". Online social networks take many forms, and are created for many reasons.

Online groups or online study clubs provide a way to share knowledge, meet other dentists with similar interests, access a calendar of events, share files, and upload pictures and videos. For dentists, this means we can now practice solo but have the benefit of knowledge sharing and connectivity to a specific group that is of interest to us Dan Marut (2009).

2.7 Tools For Online Corporate Business

The sharing of information and professional work are essential for communication and productivity of a company. With some tools on the internet, employees can create, share and edit files of work (e.g. calendar, word files, excel) in real time. These web applications are easy to use. Enabling people to improve internal communication within the company Kioskea.net( 2009).

According to Faith (2009), the best features of using social networking to promote your business are free and easy business building tools. Most social networking sites are free to join, if you are working with a limited advertising budget this may be important for your business. And, you don't have to be an internet guru or marketing expert to use them for building your customer and/or supplier list of contacts. If you're not using social networking to promote your business you really should give it a try".

2.7.1 Social Network Tools for Online Corporate Business

There are lots of tools out there, far too many to cover. The best social networking tools for solving business problems include the following: LinkedIn Facebook MySpace Twitter Flickr and Youtube.

(i) LinkedIn

LinkedIn is a business-oriented social networking site founded in December 2002 and launched in May 2003 mainly used for professional networking. It had more than 43 million registered users, spanning 170 industries. The purpose of the site is to allow registered users to maintain a list of contact details of people they know and trust in business. The people in the list are called Connections. Users can invite anyone (whether a site user or not) to become a connection. "LinkedIn takes your personal business network online and gives you access to people, jobs and opportunities like never before." is a networking Sonja (2008). It is the site designed for professionals. As a result, there are few members under age 23 or 24. Many members have been in the workforce for years; most are very well-educated.

(ii) Facebook

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Facebook has combination of resources to use. Taking approach of learning it step and step to create profile that is interesting and start engaging with your friends, make frequent updates and work toward building your profile. Creating your own sub groups within the community where you can promote events to a specified inner circle of entrepreneurs and professionals Pagiamtzis, (2009).

(iii) MySpace

The life world of MySpace is expansive, with an abundant capacity for the proliferation of networked relations. It is more than a blog and more than an instant messenger.

MySpace is not just a place to have a conversation with one friend – it is a network of friends. Thus it is not a static peer-to-peer (P2P) site where one user anonymously links to another Mark & Jennifer (2007).

MySpace.com is the social networking site that rivals Yahoo!, Google, eBay and MSN for the top spot among visitors on the Internet Alexa, (2006). Also Stefanie (2006) mentioned that "MySpace, one of the most-trafficked sites online, with membership approaching 100 million, will command the lion's share of that revenue, in the range of $180 million this year."

MySpace is the original networking tool and still millions of people use it every day. Emin & Budak (2007) mentioned that " the real miracle is in the more intentional work millions of us do to populate the Web: 80 million MySpace pages, 40 million bloggers, nearly a million amateur encyclopedias.

(iv) Twitter

Twitter is a Web 2.0 micro-blogging tool that asks users from the general public to answer a simple question, “What are you doing?” The web-based software has been described as a combination of blogging and Instant Messaging, although by limiting the postings to 140 characters, the system encourages brevity Steven (2008). Twitter is a deceptively simple system in which users create an account and post messages, or “tweets,” comprised of up to 140 characters that can be viewed by a network of associates.

Twitter was founded in March 2006. While Twitter doesn’t publish usage numbers, Forrester Research estimated the number of Twitter users at nearly 5 million in March 2009. It is one of the new communication tools parallel growing social and cultural changes (in most parts of the world) toward greater transparency and democratization. These changes are also playing out within individual businesses and non-profit organizations.

Tweeting is simple and easy to do. You can have followers or follow others on the social networking journey. Many CEO, singers and actors can be found twitting on their daily happenings Pagiamtzis, (2009). However, Pagiamtzis mentioned that "Recently many corporations have used the Twitter to keep their customer informed on company news and product and service launches". One can also post links to other networking sites that have posted information for followers to learn more about you in the social networking arena.

3. Methodology

To ensure multiple sources of evidences, the methodology involves the internal validity which provides data from many sources to analyze and discuss. As such, five manufacturing and services companies here in Malaysia were used as a target to gain insight into the research. These include J-Biotech ,TM ,Celcom, , Inter-pacific Securities corporate companies and Proton.

The selection of manufacturing and services companies was done in such a way that it will cut across major corporate companies that make use of social platform in their business activities. Priority was also placed on the respondent in the sense that, the respondent must have been a part of the management. This gives the researchers a broader and better understanding of the subject matter.

4. Data Analysis and findings

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Figure 1: Illustrating the position of the respondents

It can be seen from Figure 1 that most of the respondents from the five selective corporate companies are the top management which believes to have an insights regarding company’s business activities with assistance manager carries the highest number of respondent.

Figure 2 shows the number of respondents from selected companies and their response to various social

networks. From Figure 2 it shows that all respondent from C1 uses Facebook, whereas C2 some use facebook while others use Flikr the same for C3. C4 uses only Flikr while in C5 they used all the social network under consideration except MySpace.

11%

29%

12% 6%

12% 12%

12%

6%

Position of the Respondents

IT Manager

Assistant Manager

Executive officer

Senior Technician

Senior Engineer

Event Executive

Dealer Representatative

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Figure 2: Kind of social network tools used by selected corporate companies

The respondents were asked to rate the reasons for what they use social networking site for, each responded as shown in Table 1 here the cumulative percentage is been determined to identify the highest which is the opinion of the respondents.

Table 1: Summary Scores for the reasons of using social networking sites

Reasons for using social networking

sites

C1

C2 C3 C4 C5 TOTAL % MS MS% MS% MS% MS% %

a. Broadcast a company's latest news and blog posts

4.0

11.7 4.0 11.2 4.0 11.4 3.5 11.8 4.8 14.2

60.3

b. Interact with customers to get their trust

3.8

11.1 3.8 10.6 3.6 10.3 3.5 11.8 3.8 11.2

55

c. Improve customer understanding and satisfaction

3.6

10.5 3.8 10.6 4.2 12.0 2.5 8.4 3.8 11.2 52.7

d. Employee means of refreshment at then workplace

3.4

9.9 3.8 10.6 3.8 10.1 3.3 11.1 3.3 9.8 51.5

e. Promote company's products and services

3.6

10.5 4.0 11.2 4.2 12.0 3.8 12.8 4.3 12.7

59.2

0 0.5 1 1.5 2 2.5 3 3.5 4 4.5

J‐Biotech TM Celcom Inter‐Pacific 

Securities

Proton

Corporate Companies

Social network tools used by selected corporate companies

Facebook

MySpace

Flikr

Twitter

LinkedIn

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f.

Communication tool to share market research reports

4.0

11.7 4.0 11.2 4.2 12.0 3.5 11.8 2.5 7.4 54.1

g. Increase brand awareness

4.0

11.7 4.2 11.7 4.0 11.4 3.3 11.8 3.8 11.2

57.8

h. For having comparative

advantage 11.74.0 4.2 11.7 3.6 10.3 3.3 11.1 4.0 11.8 56.6 i. Every

organization is now on social platforms

3.8

11.1 4.0 10.6 3.4 9.7 3.0 10.1 3.5 10.4 51.9

Total Mean

Score 35.834.2 35.0 29.7 33.8

C1: J-Biotech C2: TM C3: Celcom C4: Inter-Pacific Securities C5: Proton MS: Mean Score

The Table above shows that the respondents from each company it shows that all the options have the

average mean score of 3.6. From the cumulative percentages and the mean scores, it is obvious that the first five reasons why corporate companies use social networking site with cumulative percentage of 60.3, 59.2, 57.8, 56.6, 55.are as follows:

(1) Broadcast a company's latest news and blog posts (2) Promote company's products and services (3) Increase brand awareness

(4) For having comparative advantage through marketing on social platforms (5) Interact with customers to get their trust

Table 2: Summary Scores for the ways that social networks help in promoting business

Ways of Promoting Business

C1

C2 C3 C4 C5 Total % MS % MS % MS % MS % MS %

a. Hire potential

employees 3.8 19.8 4.2 20.2 3.2 18.4 3.5 19.9 3.3 18.1 96.4

b. Market products and services to target customers

4.2 21.9 4.2 20.2 3.6 20.7 3.5 19.9 3.3 18.1 100.8

c. Announce special offers and implement new marketing campaigns,

3.6 18.8 4.0 19.2 3.8 21.8 3.5 19.9 3.8 20.9 100.6 d. To gain access to

several potential new customers

4.0 20.8 4.2 20.2 3.6 20.7 3.3 18.8 3.8 20.9 101.4

e. Share ideas and ask company-related questions,

3.6 18.8 4.2 20.2 3.2 18.4 3.8 21.6 4.0 22.0 101 Total Mean Score 19.2 20.8 17.4 17.6 18.2

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Based on the opinion of the respondents, the three options with the cumulative percentage of 101.4, 101 and 100.8 are the views of the respondents in choosing the ways that social networking sites help in promoting business activities. These options are summarized in ascending order as follows:

(1) To gain access to several potential new customers (2) Share ideas and ask company-related questions (3) Market products and services to target customers

In order to find the impact of the social network strategy regarding marketing products, services and

customer relationship, the respondents were asked to rate why they promote products and services to improve sales using social networking sites. They responded upon the options by rating them are summarized in the Table 3 below;

Table 3: Summary Scores for how businesses could be influenced more by social network option.

How Business could be influenced by social

network

C1

C2 C3 C4 C5 Total % MS MS% MS% MS% MS% %

a.By Revenue generation

from advertisement 18.63.8 17.93.5 19.83.4 20.53.5 16.13.0 92.9 b. By interacting with

unknown people. 17.63.6 20.54.0 20.93.6 22.23.8 18.83.5 100 c.Increasing relationship

with customers and openly share idea.

4.4

21.6 20.54.0 20.93.6 17.53.0 23.14.3 103

d. In building a trust peer option when making purchase.

4.2

20.6 20.54.0 19.83.4 20.53.5 23.14.3 104

e.Increasing attentiveness and efficiency in business efficiency.

4.4

21.6 20.54.0 18.63.2 19.33.3 18.83.5 98.8

Total Mean Score 19.520.4 17.2 17.1 18.6 C1: J-Biotech C2: TM C3: Celcom C4: Inter-Pacific Securities C5: Proton MS: Mean Score

From Table 3 above, the options were also rated by the respective corporate companies; means and

cumulative percentage were also instituted. It’s cleared that the options with highest cumulative percentage of 104, 103 and 100 are listed as below:

(1) In building a trust peer option when making purchase (2) By interacting with unknown people

(3) Increasing relationship with customers and openly share idea.

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Table 4: Summary Scores for recommendation option for employees to use social network tools for corporate business.

Reasons for employees to use social network tools s

C1

C2 C3 C4 C5 Total % MS MS% MS% MS% MS% %

a.Improve employee

performance and organization alignment

3.8

20.4 3.8 3.419.0 3.019.3 3.517.3 94.318.3 b. Enable employees’

collaboration that improve business processes

3.4

18.3 3.8 3.419.0 3.519.3 4.020.2 20.9 97.7

c.Developing better

communication media with partners and customers

3.8

20.4 4.3 3.821.5 3.821.6 4.022.0 20.9 106.4

d. Interacting with company senior management to help bridge information group

3.6

19.4 3.8 3.419.0 3.519.3 3.820.2 9719.9 e.Making employees to stay

updated on current events, headlines and market update

4.0

21.5 4.3 3.621.5 3.520.5 3.820.2 19.9 103.6 Total Mean Score 20.018.6 17.6 17.3 19.1

C1: J-Biotech C2: TM C3: Celcom C4: Inter-Pacific Securities C5: Proton MS: Mean Score In Table 4 above, the options were rated by the respondents from the selected corporate companies in

response to the question asked. The options with the highest cumulative percentage are considered to be the options chosen by the respective respondents. The cumulative percentage of 106.4, 103.6 and 97.7 are considered to be the highest indicating the opinion of the respondents. The options are listed in ascending order as follows:

(1) Developing better communication media with partners and customers

(2) Making employees to stay updated on current events, headlines and market update (3) Enable employees’ collaboration that improve business processes

Lastly, the respondents were also asked to recommend corporate businesses to lunch their own social

networking site apart from the known social platforms. The responded in such a way that are summarised in the following Table 5 below;

Table 5: Summary Scores for corporate companies to lunch their own social networking site

Recommendation for corporate companies to lunch their own

social networking

C1

C2 C3 C4 C5 Total % MS MS% MS% MS% MS% %

a. To be fully considered effective and integrated part of company strategy

3.8

20.4 4.0 19.9 3.6 3.320.2 3.319.5 97.817.8 b. Share ideas and asking

company-related questions 19.43.6 3.8 18.9 3.6 3.520.2 3.320.7 9717.8 c. Making company to understand

and reach out .to the need of customer

4.0

21.5 4.0 19.9 3.6 3.020.2 4.317.8 23.2 102.6

d. Communication with employees and share market research report

3.8

20.4 4.0 19.9 3.6 3.520.2 3.820.7 20.5 101.7

e. Sharing knowledge among employees is pick some business information along the way

3.4

18.3 4.3 21.4 3.4 3.618.1 3.821.3 20.5 99.6 Total Mean Score 20.118.6 17.8 16.9 18.5

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From Table 5 above, the highest cumulative percentages are 102.6, 101.7 and 99.6 of options c, d and e respectively. Based on the cumulative percentage, the respondents are of the views that the three options why corporate companies should lunch their own social networking platform apart from the known ones. These include the following in ascending order:

(1) Making company to understand and reach out to the need of customer (2) Communication with employees and share market research report

(3) Sharing knowledge among employees is pick some business information along the way

5. Conclusions

In this paper we conducted research on the influence some selected social networking and their impact on some selected corporate company is in Malaysia. The results showed that the influence of the social networking depends on the how the worker in the company uses the social network. As it can be seen while in C1 all the workers used Facebook in C5, the workers used all the social networking tools except MySpace. In the various results presented from Table 1 to Table 5 the degree of the usage and its important were presented. Data analysis of the survey interprets the respondents view collected through the questionnaire.

Acknowledgment

We would like to thank to all the reviewers for their insightful comment. This work was sponsored by the Research Management Center, Universiti Teknologi Malaysia.

References

[1 Alexa. (2006). Alexa traffic rankings, available at : http://www.alexa.com/# (Retrieved on 21/08/2009.

[2] Boyd D. M. & Ellison, N. B. (2007). Social network sites: Definition, history, and scholarship. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 13(1), article 11 form: http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol13/issue1/boyd.ellison.htm . (Retrieved on 22/08/2009). [3] Christopher (2008) Executive Briefing: Social networking for businesses & associations. PP.1-8.

[4] Danah (2007) Social Network Sites: Definition, History, and Scholarship School of Information University of California-Berkeley. [5] Dan Marut (2009) Social networking for dentists – made easy.

[6] DiMicco et al (2008) Motivations for social networking at work,” Proceedings of the ACM 2008 conference on Computer supported cooperative work, San Diego, CA, USA: ACM, 2008, pp. 711-720.

[7] Emin & Budak (2007), “Web 2.0 - an Editor’s Perspective: New Media for Knowledge Co-creation, IADIS international conference on web based communities’ 2007 pg 27-34.

[8] Facebook Adds Marketplace of Classified Ads (2007-05-12) available at: www.physorg.com/news98196557.html .(Retrieved on 24/08/2009).

[9] Faith Draper (2009),Writing Level Star: Promote your business using social networking tools.

[10] Graham et al (2008) corporate business make money, available at: http://www.tcf-nj.org/2008/TCF-paper.pdf . (Retrieved on 22/08/2009).

[11] Jim Pagiamtzis (2009), Social Networking Strategy: Communication is the key!

[12] Kioskea.net (2009) Corporate Tools for Online Business, available at: http://en.kioskea.net/faq/sujet-1904-corporate-tools-for-online-business.(Retrieved on 24/08/2009).

[13] Krista (2009) 18 Using Social Networking Sites: You are hired! CV. 2009.

[14] Louis (2005) Capital and Benefit in Social Networks, Computer Science Dept. University of Maryland College Park, MD. [15] Marshall Kirkpatrick “Top Ten Social Networking Sites See 47% Growth,” the socialsoftwareweblog (17 May 2006) . [16]

http://socialsoftware.weblogsinc.com/2006/05/17/top-10-social-networking-sites-see-47-growtw.

[17] Mayer, R. C., J. H. Davis, and F. D. Schoorman (1995) “An Integrative Model of Organizational Trust,” The Academy of Management Review (20) 3, pp. 709-734.

[18] Metzger, M. J. (2004) “Privacy, Trust, and Disclosure: Exploring Barriers to Electronic Commerce 9 (4),” Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication (9) 4.

[19] Mark & Jennifer (2007) Learning to Immaterial Labour 2.0: MySpace and Social Networks . [20] Nicole S. Cohen (2008) The Valorization of Surveillance: Towards a Political Economy of Facebook. [21] Roloff,( 1981). Interpersonal communication: the social exchange approach.

[22] Sonja Jefferson (2008) How to use LinkedIn to bring in business Available at: http://www.sonjajefferson.co.uk/.(Retrieved on 24/08/2009)

[23] Stefanie Olsen (2006) MySpace blurs line between friends and flacks. [24] Steven Chase (2008): Twitter as KM Technology.

Imagem

Figure 1: Illustrating the position of the respondents
Figure 2:  Kind of social network tools used by selected corporate companies
Table 2: Summary Scores for the ways that social networks help in promoting business
Table 3: Summary Scores for how businesses could be influenced more by social network option.
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