Social Computing

Describe six Web 2.0 tools and�two major types of Web 2.0 sites

• Web 2.0
• The key developments of Web 1.0 were the creation of Web sites and the commercialization of the Web.
• Users typically had minimal interaction with Web 1.0 sites. Rather, they passively receive information from those sites.

​

​

Web 2.0

• Web 2.0 is a popular term that has proved difficult to define.
• According to Tim O’Reilly, a noted blogger, Web 2.0 is a loose collection of information technologies and applications, plus the Web sites that use them.
• These Web sites enrich the user experience by encouraging user participation, social interaction, and collaboration.

• Six Web 2.0 information technology tools, which include
• AJAX,
• tagging,
• Really Simple Syndication,
• blogs,
• microblogs, and
• wikis.

Ajax�

• Most Web 2.0 applications have rich, user-friendly interfaces based on AJAX.
• AJAX is a Web development technique that enables users to reload portions of Web pages with fresh data instead of having to reload the entire Web page.
• This process speeds up response time and increases user satisfaction.

Tagging

• A tag is a keyword or term that describes a piece of information—for example, a blog, a picture, an article, or a video clip.
• Users typically choose tags that are meaningful to them.
• Tagging allows users to place information in multiple, overlapping associations rather than in rigid categories.
• Eg Facebook face and google map

Really Simple Syndication

• Really Simple Syndication (RSS) is a Web 2.0 feature that allows you to receive the information you want (customized information), when you want it, without having to surf thousands of Web sites.
• RSS allows anyone to syndicate (publish) his or her blog, or any other content, to anyone who has an interest in subscribing to it.

• When changes to the content are made,
• subscribers receive a notification of the changes and an idea of what the new content contains.
• Subscribers can then click on a link that will take them to the full text of the new content.

​

• For example, CNN.com provides RSS feeds for each of its main topic areas, such as world news, sports news, technology news, and entertainment news.
• NBC uses RSS feeds to allow viewers to download the most current version of shows such as Meet the Press and NBC Nightly News.

Blogs

• A weblog (blog for short) is a personal Web site, open to the public, in which the site creator expresses his or her feelings or opinions via a series of chronological entries.
• Bloggers—people who create and maintain blogs—write stories, convey news, and provide links to other articles and Web sites that are of interest to them.
• The simplest method of creating a blog is to sign up with a blogging service provider, such as www.blogger.com (now owned by Google),

Microblogging

• Microblogging is a form of blogging that allows users to write short messages (or capture an image or embedded video) and publish them.
• These messages can be submitted via text messaging from mobile phones, instant messaging, e-mail, or simply over the Web.
• The content of a microblog differs from that of a blog because of the limited space per message (usually up to 140 characters).

Twitter

• Twitter is a free microblogging service that allows its users to send messages and read other users’ messages and updates, known as tweets.
• Tweets are displayed on the user’s profile page and delivered to other users who have signed up to receive them.
• Twitter is becoming a very useful business tool.
• It allows companies to quickly share information with people interested in their products

Wikis

• A wiki is a Web site made up entirely of content posted by users. Wikis have an “edit” link on each page that allows any user to add, change, or delete material, thus fostering easy collaboration.
• Wikis take advantage of the combined input of many individuals. Consider Wikipedia (www .wikipedia.org), an online encyclopedia that is the largest existing wiki.
• Wikipedia contains more than 3.4 million articles in English, which get a combined total of nearly 500 million views every day.

Two major types of Web 2.0 sites, social networking sites and mashups

• Social Networking Web Sites
• A social network is a social structure composed of individuals, groups, or organizations linked by values, visions, ideas, financial exchange, friendship, kinship, conflict, or trade.
• Social networking refers to activities performed using social software tools (e.g., blogging) or social networking features (e.g., media sharing).

• Facebook would take advantage of relationships among individuals to offer a richer online experience.
• Social networks can also be used to determine the social capital of individual participants.

​

Mashups

• mixes them together to create a new kind of content.
• The launch of Google Maps is credited with providing the start for mashups.
• A user can take a map from Google, add his or her data, and then display a map mashup on his or her Web site that plots crime scenes, cars for sale, or anything else (see Figure

Everyblock.com

• Everyblock.com is a mashup of Web services that integrates content from newspapers, blogs, and government databases to inform citizens of cities such as Chicago, New York, and Seattle about what is happening in their neighborhoods.
• This information includes criminal activities, restaurant inspections, and local photos posted on Flickr.

Fundamentals of Social Computing�in Business

• Social computing in business, or social commerce, refers to the delivery of electronic commerce activities and transactions through social computing.
• Social commerce also supports social interactions and user contributions, allowing customers to participate actively in the marketing and selling of products and services in online marketplaces and communities.
• With social commerce, individuals can collaborate online, obtain advice from trusted individuals, and find and purchase goods and services.

a few examples of social commerce:�

• • Disney allows people to book tickets on Facebook without leaving the social network.
• • PepsiCo gives a live notification when its customers are close to physical stores (grocery, restaurants, gas stations) that sell Pepsi products.
• The company then uses Foursquare to send them coupons and discount information.

• • Mountain Dew attracts video game lovers and sports enthusiasts via Dewmocracy contests.
• The company also encourages the most dedicated community members to contribute ideas on company products.
• • Levi’s advertises on Facebook by enabling consumers to populate a “shopping cart” based on what their friends think they would like.
• • Wendy’s uses Facebook and Twitter to award $50 gift cards to people who submit the funniest and quirkiest responses to various challenges.

Potential Benefits of Social Commerce

social computing does involve risks.

• negative reviews and feedback (But It can be some of the most valuable information that a company receives, if it utilizes this information properly)
• when a company creates a Facebook business page, by default the site allows other members of the Web site—potentially including disgruntled customers or unethical competitors—to post notes on the firm’s Facebook Wall and to comment on what the firm has posted.

• if the company turns off the feature that lets other users write on its Wall, people may wonder what the company is afraid of.
• Another risk is the 20–80 rule of thumb, which posits that a minority of individuals (20 percent) contribute most of the content (80 percent) to blogs, wikis, social computing Web sites, etc
• For example, in an analysis of thousands of submissions to the news voting site Digg over a three-week time frame, the Wall Street Journal reported that roughly 33 percent of the stories that made it to Digg’s homepage were submitted by 30 contributors (out of 900,000 registered members).

Other risks of social computing include the following:�

• • Information security concerns
• • Invasion of privacy
• • Violation of intellectual property and copyright
• • Employees’ reluctance to participate
• • Data leakage of personal information or corporate strategic information
• • Poor or biased quality of users’ generated content
• • Cyber bullying/cyber stalking and employee harassment

3. Social Computing in Business: Shopping

• Social shopping is a method of electronic commerce that takes all of the key aspects of social networks—friends, groups, voting, comments, discussions, reviews, etc.—and focuses them on shopping.
• Social shopping helps shoppers connect with one another based on tastes, location, age, gender, and other selected attributes.

• For example, popular brands such as Gap, Shopbop, InStyle, and Lisa Klein are joining communities on Stylehive(www.stylehive.com) to help promote the season’s latest fashion collections.
• Shoppers are using sites like ThisNext (www.thisnext.com) to create profiles and blogs about their favorite products in social communities.
• Shoppers can tag each item, so that all items become searchable.

Ratings, Reviews, and Recommendations

• Prior to making a purchase, customers typically collect information such as what brand to buy, from which vendor, and at what price.
• Online customers do this by using shopping aids such as comparison agents and by visiting Web sites such as Epinions (www.epinions.com).

Shopping Communities and Clubs

• Shopping clubs host sales for their members that last just a few days and usually feature luxury brands at heavily discounted prices.
• Club organizers host three to seven sales per day, usually via e-mail messages that entice club members to shop at more than 70 percent off retail—but quickly, before supplies run out.

Social Marketplaces and Direct Sales

• Social marketplaces act as online intermediaries that harness the power of social networks for introducing, buying, and selling products and services.
• A social marketplace helps members market their own creations
• Flipsy (www.flipsy.com) can be used by anyone to list, buy, and sell books, music, movies, and games.

Peer-to-Peer Shopping Models

• Peer-to-peer shopping models are the high-tech version of old-fashioned bazaars and bartering systems.
• Individuals use these models to sell, buy, rent, or barter online with other individuals.
• For example, many Web sites have emerged to facilitate online sharing.
• SnapGoods created a community of people who rent goods to people in need, usually for the short term. SnapGoods helps these people connect over the Internet.

4. Social Computing in Business: Marketing

• Marketing can be defined as the process of building profitable customer relationships by creating value for customers and capturing value in return.
• There are many components to a marketing campaign, including (1) define your target audience; (2) develop your message (i.e., how you will solve their problem); (3) decide on how you will deliver your message (e.g., e-mail, snail mail, Web advertising, and/or social networks); and (4) follow up.

Advertising

• Social advertising refers to advertising formats that make use of the social context of the user viewing the ad.
• Social advertising is the first form Of advertising to leverage user dynamics such as peer pressure, friend recommendations and likes, and other forms of social influence.

• Viral marketing—that is, word-of-mouth advertising—lends itself especially well to social networking.
• For example, Stormhoek Vineyards (www.stormhoek.com) initiated a marketing campaign by offering bloggers a free bottle of wine. Within six months, about 100 of these bloggers subsequently had posted voluntary comments—the majority of them positive—about the winery on their blogs. In turn, these comments were read by other bloggers.

​

There are other innovative ways to advertise in social media

• • Use a company Facebook page, including a store that attracts fans and lets them “meet” other customers. Then, advertise in your Facebook store.
• • Tweet business success stories to your customers.
• • Integrate ads into YouTube videos.

Market Research

• Traditionally, marketing professionals used demographics compiled by market research firms as one of their primary tools to identify and target potential customers.
• Obtaining this information was time-consuming and costly, because marketing professionals had to ask potential customers to provide it.
• Today, however, members of social networks provide this information voluntarily on their pages!

• Because of the open nature of social networking, merchants can easily find their customers, see what they do online, and see who their friends are.
• This information provides a new opportunity to assess markets in near real time.
• For example, Dell Computer operates a feedback Web site called IdeaStorm that allows customers to suggest and vote on improvements in its offerings

Conducting Market Research Using Social Networks

• Customer sentiment expressed on Twitter, Facebook, and similar sites represents an incredibly valuable source of information for companies.
• Customer activities on social networking sites generate huge amounts of data that must be analyzed, so that management can conduct better marketing campaigns and improve their product design and their service offerings.
• The monitoring, collection, and analysis of socially generated data and the resultant strategic decisions are combined in a process known as social intelligence

Wendy’s International (www.wendys.com),

• which uses software to sift through the more than 500,000 customer messages the fast-food chain collects
• each year.
• Using Clarabridge (www.clarabridge.com) text analytics software, Wendy’s analyzes comments from its online notes, e-mails, receipt-based surveys, and social media.
• Prior to adopting this software, the company used a combination of spreadsheets and keyword searches to review comments in what it describes as a slow and expensive manual approach. In contrast, the new software enables Wendy’s to track customer experiences at the store level within minutes.

How to use Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn for market research.

• Using Facebook for Market Research. There are several ways to use Facebook for
• market research. Consider the following examples:
• • Obtain feedback from your Facebook fans (and their friends if possible) on advertising campaigns, market research, etc. It is like having a free focus group.

• • Test-market your messages. Provide two or three options, and ask fans which one they prefer and why.
• • Use Facebook for survey invitations (i.e., to recruit participants). Essentially, turn Facebook into a giant panel, and ask users to participate in a survey.
• Facebook offers a self-service model for displaying ads, and these ads can be invitations to take a survey.
• Facebook also allows you to target your audience very specifically based on traditional demographic criteria (age, gender, etc.).

Using Twitter for Market Research.

• Your customers, your prospects, and industry thought leaders all use Twitter, making it a rich source of instantly updated information.
• Consider the following examples:
• • Visit Twitter Search (www.twitter.com/search). Enter a company’s Twitter name. Not only can you follow what companies are saying, you can also follow what everyone is saying to them.

• Monitoring replies to your competitors and their employees will help you develop your own Twitter strategy by enabling you to observe (a) what your competitors are doing and, more importantly, (b) what people think about it.
• You can also follow the company’s response to this feedback.

• Take advantage of the tools that enable you to find people in the industries they operate in.
• Use search.twitter.com to monitor industry-specific keywords. Check out Twellow (www.twellow.com).
• This site automatically categorizes a Twitter user into one to three industries based on that person’s bio and tweets.

• Do you want to know what topic is on most people’s minds today? If so, then review the chart on TweetStats (www.tweetstats.com).
• It will show you the most frequently used words in all of Tweetdom, so you can be a part of those conversations.

• An increasing number of companies are utilizing Twitter to solicit information from customers and to interact with them. Examples are Dell (connecting with customers), JetBlue (learning about customers), Teusner Wines (gathering feedback, sharing information), and
• Pepsi (fast response time in dealing with complaints).

Using LinkedIn for Market Research.

• Post a question (e.g., solicit advice) regarding the topic or issue you are interested in. You may get a better result if you go to a specific LinkedIn group.
• For example, let’s take a look at how Mountain Dew uses social computing to conduct market research.

5. Social Computing in Business:�Customer Relationship Management

• Customers are now incredibly empowered. Companies are closely monitoring social computing not only because they are mindful of the negative comments posted by social network members, but also because they perceive an opportunity to involve customers proactively to reduce problems by improved customer service.

• Consider the following examples:
• • Qantas airlines (www.qantas.com.au) had a policy that required fl yers to store large musical instruments in the cargo hold. Unfortunately, policy sometimes caused damage to the instruments. After suffering $1,200 in damage to his saxophone, one customer, Jamie Oehlers of Australia, organized a Facebook campaign to persuade the airline to eliminate this policy.
• When one person complains, he or she typically receives a nice letter, but company policy most likely will not change.
• When more than 8,700 people joined forces on Facebook

6. Social Computing in Business:�Human Resource Management

• Human resource (HR) departments in many organizations use social computing applications primarily in the areas of recruiting and training. For example, Deloite Touche Tohmatsu created a social network to assist its HR managers in downsizing and regrouping teams.

Recruiting

• Both recruiters and job seekers are moving to online social networks as recruiting platforms.
• Enterprise recruiters are scanning online social networks, blogs, and other social resources to identify and fi nd information about potential employees.

• If job seekers are online and active, there is a good chance that they will be seen by recruiters. In addition, on social networks there are many passive job seekers—people who are employed but would take a better job if one appeared.

​

• So, it is important that both active and passive job seekers maintain online profiles that truly reflect their background and skills.