Era Of Social Networks Research Articles

Informal communication styles benefit McDonald's and Ford

PurposeThe article's aim is to outline the importance of fluid communication patterns that develop certain employee attributes and improve organizational performance. It seeks to focus on the examples of McDonald's and Ford.Design/methodology/approachThe article draws on work carried out by the authors, plus the HR literature.FindingsIt is argued that flexible, easy and team‐friendly communication styles, rather than the traditional system of bureaucratic communication, are the way forward. It reveals, through the examples of McDonald's and Ford, that informal communication protocols can mean better customer service and organizational performance.Practical implicationsThe article draws attention to a couple of the disadvantages of more open, informal communication styles – in particular that employees can originate incorrect information which nevertheless is absorbed by people around the world, and that employees who move to another company can take sensitive information about their original employer with them. It highlights the effects of modern social networking on traditional, top‐down styles or organizational communication.Originality/valueThe article questions whether top‐down styles can survive in an era of instant social networking.

One, None and One Hundred Thousand Profiles: Re-Imagining the Pirandellian Identity Dilemma in the Era of Online Social Networks

Uno, Nessuno, Centomila (One, No One and One Hundred Thousand) is a classic novel by Italian playwright Luigi Pirandello. Published in 1925, it recounts the tragedy of Vitangelo Moscarda, a man who struggles to reclaim a coherent and unitary identity for himself in the face of an inherently social and multi-faceted world. What would Moscarda identity tragedy look like today? In this article we transplant Moscarda's identity play from its offline setting to the contemporary arena of social media and online social networks. With reference to established theories on identity construction, performance, and self-presentation, we re-imagine how Moscarda would go about defending the integrity of his selfhood in the face of the discountenancing influences of the online world.

Going Virtual to Engage a Global Museum Community

Created at the dawn of the social networking era, the International Museum of Women (IMOW) is an online museum that has consistently harnessed online technology in the service of its mission. Recognizing that online technology is evolving and ever changing, the museum must be flexible, adapting delivery of its content to the tools available at that moment. In this vein, IMOW's latest exhibition Young Women Speaking the Economy employs social media technology to reach into the far corners of the world, fulfilling its mission of social change and extending its community beyond where it has previously been.

SocialSpamGuard

We have entered the era of social media networks represented by Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Flickr. Internet users now spend more time on social networks than search engines. Business entities or public figures set up social networking pages to enhance direct interactions with online users. Social media systems heavily depend on users for content contribution and sharing. Information is spread across social networks quickly and effectively. However, at the same time social media networks become susceptible to different types of unwanted and malicious spammer or hacker actions. There is a crucial need in the society and industry for security solution in social media. In this demo, we propose SocialSpamGuard , a scalable and online social media spam detection system based on data mining for social network security. We employ our GAD clustering algorithm for large scale clustering and integrate it with the designed active learning algorithm to deal with the scalability and real-time detection challenges.

The social era of the web starts now

In the beginning was the personal computer. Not long after, people started connecting them together on networks, culminating in the World Wide Web and the Web browser, which launched the first great era of the Web. Then came the search engine, which launched the second great era of the Web, the era of Google. Now comes the third: the era of social networks. Facebook has jumped out to a commanding lead, but Google hasn't really started fighting yet. So the stage is set for a battle of, well, biblical proportions. The wizards at the Googleplex in Mountain View, Calif., are working furiously on a social network to rival Facebook's. Just a few miles away, in Palo Alto, Facebook is preparing for an initial public offering to give it the money it needs to take on Google's Goliath. And last month, the clash got a bit ugly when it was revealed that Facebook had hired a public relations agency to slime Google's social networking tactics.

Patients’ Evaluations of Health Care Providers in the Era of Social Networking: An Analysis of Physician-Rating Websites

Internet-based social networking tools that allow users to share content have enabled a new form of public reporting of physician performance: the physician-rating website. To describe the structure and content of physician-rating websites and to assess the extent to which a patient might find them valuable. We searched Google for websites that allowed patients to review physicians in the US. We included websites that met predetermined criteria, identified common elements of these websites, and recorded website characteristics. We then searched the websites for reviews of a random sample of 300 Boston physicians. Finally, we separately analyzed quantitative and narrative reviews. We identified 33 physician-rating websites, which contained 190 reviews for 81 physicians. Most reviews were positive (88%). Six percent were negative, and six percent were neutral. Generalists and subspecialists did not significantly differ in number or nature of reviews. We identified several narrative reviews that appeared to be written by the physicians themselves. Physician-rating websites offer patients a novel way to provide feedback and obtain information about physician performance. Despite controversy surrounding these sites, their use by patients has been limited to date, and a majority of reviews appear to be positive.

Social software: fun and games, or business tools?

This is the era of social networking, collective intelligence, participation, collaborative creation, and borderless distribution. Every day we are bombarded with more publicity about collaborative environments, news feeds, blogs, wikis, podcasting, webcasting, folksonomies, social bookmarking, social citations, collaborative filtering, recommender systems, media sharing, massive multiplayer online games, virtual worlds, and mash-ups. This sort of anarchic environment appeals to the digital natives, but which of these so-called `Web 2.0' technologies are going to have a real business impact? This paper addresses the impact that issues such as quality control, security, privacy and bandwidth may have on the implementation of social networking in hide-bound, large organizations.

Social networks, gender, and friending: An analysis of MySpace member profiles

AbstractIn 2007, the social networking Web site MySpace apparently overthrew Google as the most visited Web site for U.S. Web users. If this heralds a new era of widespread online social networking, then it is important to investigate user behaviour and attributes. Although there has been some research into social networking already, basic demographic data is essential to set previous results in a wider context and to give insights to researchers, marketers and developers. In this article, the demographics of MySpace members are explored through data extracted from two samples of 15,043 and 7,627 member profiles. The median declared age of users was surprisingly high at 21, with a small majority of females. The analysis confirmed some previously reported findings and conjectures about social networking, for example, that female members tend to be more interested in friendship and males more interested in dating. In addition, there was some evidence of three different friending dynamics, oriented towards close friends, acquaintances, or strangers. Perhaps unsurprisingly, female and younger members had more friends than others, and females were more likely to maintain private profiles, but both males and females seemed to prefer female friends, with this tendency more marked in females for their closest friend. The typical MySpace user is apparently female, 21, single, with a public profile, interested in online friendship and logging on weekly to engage with a mixed list of mainly female “friends” who are predominantly acquaintances.