The Changes in Business Communication over the Last 20 Years - Coursework Example

The Impact of Social Media on Contemporary Business Communication Name Institutional Affiliation The Impact of Social Media on Contemporary Business Communication Introduction Many sites of the social media are becoming commonplace with the advent of technology. The social media has many implications on businesses since it influences the business to consumer relationships both directly and indirectly. The social media has grown exponentially to give offernizations an opportunity to hold conversations with many global customers (Merrill, Lartham, Santalesa, & Navetta, 2011). Stelzner (2012, 5) found out in a research that about 83% of the business marketers appreciate the value of the use of social media in businesses. This paper discusses about the impact of social media on business and how the mode of communication can be used to address the issues that influence them. The Changes in Business Communication over the Last 20 Years Modern media is making a large impact in all people’s lives today. The media has infiltrated both into the professional and personal aspects of life. Social media is used over the internet in the active and personal forms. The popular examples of the social media sites that attract people’s attention include Facebook, Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn, YouTube, various podcasts, blogs and livestreams. Still, organizations, businesses, communities, and even the government also interact and access their stakeholders using the social media. Social media have both advantages and disadvantages and they have recently raised concern due to their potential that they hold for abuse. As such, measured need to be put in place to ensure their responsible utilization. Within the past 20 years, the social media has become a global phenomenon that is an interface among a milliard people where entities exchange, create, and share ideas and information. The development of the internet technology has facilitated the interactive platforms of the social media where entities modify, create, and publish content that is generated independently. Technologists have used innovating media and web 2.0 concepts to develop blogs, wikis, video-sharing sites, and social networking sites. An increasing number of people across the world interact and communicate, use various web-based tools, share interests, disseminate information, and interact with each other. The social media has several characteristics. Participation social media constitutes the stimulation of people to communicate and interact with each other. Open social media constitutes the kind that have few barriers and with an open system. Conversation social media involves two way communication. Community social media supports communities. Connectedness social media uses resources, people, sites, and links (Jurišová, 2013, 404). Facebook, Cyworld, and MySpace are the social networking websites that are becoming the primary media for communication for the digitally literate growing generations. The growth of such sites are driven by readily available internet enabled multimedia services, the maturing social software, and high broadband penetration. The sites have penetrated to the growing number of enthusiastic users. The advertisers, companies, and consumer product companies have developed a tremendous interest in the social media as they aspire to use it to build brand loyalty, reach out to customers, and communicate with the partners, suppliers and employees who are geographically dispersed (Dam, Nelson, & Lozinski, 2008, 4). Communication Challenges to Businesses in the 21st Century Communication technology has in various ways such as the development of social media lowered the monitoring and information costs. However, by facilitating globalization and foreign direct investments, the technology has created various challenges. The global communications have flourished with the due to failure to focus on the initial vision of the development of the internet technology. the innovations ofted lead to consequences that are not intended (Rosenfeld, Lorsch, & Khurana, 2011, 9). Individuals obtain help the financial, communication, and computing even though their development is sophisticated. Some companies with the help of insurance corporations would develop and package their own products. The globe is experiencing numerous breakthroughs with the advancement of technology from the early days of telegraphs to the modern internet technology. Numerous challenges have ensues in the process and the development of the social media has created more complicated challenges including abuse. Technological innovation has intertwined the intellectual fashion and the imploding business models. Two varying journalistic genres have ensued. With the public interest variety, the profession has developed a paradoxical pride that it has lost funding avenues and that it does not depend on the economy. With the financial reporting, the media echoes the economic and financial flaws of the organizations (Rosenfeld, Lorsch, & Khurana, 2011, 54). Case Study A relevant case study constitutes the one that was conducted with a class of business undergraduates and on two multinational companies. The study involved an analysis on the social media and the practices of language on the participants. The study revealed the communication skills on the undergraduate skills would use on the context of the social media. The case study also focused on the establishment of the intercultural communication skills in their education. The study showed that the students could have sound knowledge of the multilingual and cultural nature but they lacked the skills of intercultural communication that was necessary for effective interaction (Briguglio, 2007, 8). As such, the study reveals that the intercultural communication skills are necessary for effective business communication on the social media. The study most importantly revealed that for employees of companies to interact effectively on the social media, they would need to develop intelligibility and interpretability skills in a specified language. Since English is the predominant language in business communication, the study as when focused on revealing that the effectiveness of business communication lies on both the second language speakers and first language speakers. The first language speakers should focus more on interpretability and the second language speakers should focus on intelligibility (Briguglio, 2007, 11). Impacts of the Changes on Business Farooq, Szabist, and Karachi (2012, 628) state that decisions to purchase among the customers depends largely on how much the people know each other and how much they trust each other. Most online purchasers wait to get reviews about the products that they are interested in before purchasing them. Many e-commerse companies ask their customers to leave reviews and ratings for the products that they purchase. Other e-commerce companies have resorted to using the social media for marketing. Many factors affect the user behavior including friends on the social media. The social media evidently increases revenue and sales when used appropriately. A business would greatly enhance its productivity by analyzing the user behavior on the social media. Most companies insist that the user interface (UI) greatly enhance business and they have made more investments to enhance its attractiveness. Businesses are investing more to analyze user behavior on logging in to a website. The organizations venture in understanding user behavior for them to enhance the performance of the sites (Farooq, Jan, & Karachi, 2012, 628). The success of social networks cannot be predicted because there is no universal formula that can determine it. The social media is new, used of very distinct devices that have various capabilities, used with people from different cultural and economic environments, and unequally distributed. The social media has diversified the avenues of advertizing, which is a very prominent form of revenue collection. Seismic shifts have been experienced in various industries including the advertising, media, consumer electronics, hospitality, retail, travel, banking, and music. The changes have reshaped the relationship between individuals and businesses especially in the past few years. It has created new markets and and even changed the definition of business in general. Fundamentally, every aspect of business has been changed including the logistics, public relations, internal communications, staff recruitment, customer service, and sales (Global Agenda Council on Social Media, n. d., 12). Utilization of the New Ways of Communication in the Case Study Business The analysis on the use of social media and language practices in the two multinational companies, from Hong Kong and provided insights about the manner in which the language used on the social media depends on the intercultural communication skills for a successful marketing. The study in the Australian institution of higher education also analyzed the importance of the intercultural communication skills for the studies and for successful carrying out of the social media (Briguglio, 2007, 8). The changes that would facilitate effective communication when advertising involve adequate information of the social website users such as their behaviors and motives. The changes the can be tackled more efficiently through developing relevant policies on the approach used to understand the whole spectrum of the users for an organization to dispense business information that is most relevant to the consumers. The approach would help in developing a framework that is coherent for issuing appropriate and effective business strategies (Briguglio, 2007, 10). The latest communication and information technologies have a paramount capacity to improve the communication of risk. The social media empowers all technologically literate people in a community to transmit or gather information to differentiate it from the modes of communication that were used in the past. The people acquire information in real time and they are enabled with the direct information from the relevant events. Advice and guidance is as well available to the public but the social media makes sending of the information more personal. For instance, Twitter once was brought to the limelight when a study showed that 2% of what the users communicated involved the influenza pandemic. As such, the social media has a very huge potential to be used by a business to send out beneficial information. The effectiveness of the social media can be exemplified by the fact that the medium served as a primary mode of communication for the protesters in Iran during the 2009 post-election violence. The 140 character microblogs of Twitter from the people of Iran enabled the whole world to understand the events that were going on in the country. The trapped survivors in Haiti as well got help from the blogs that were commonly referred to as “hashtag #rescuemehaiti”. It served as an important tool for managing disasters or “isushahidi”. Therefore, with appropriate and positive use of the media, businesses can greatly enhance their operations. Just as in the case for Haiti where the social media informed the people of where the aftershocks could be located, organizations can as well use the social media to disperse intended information to the consumers. The organizations would need to understand the manner in which information on the social media spreads in the rumor-mongering manner. Security officials are always sensitive to negative messages and successful organizations should opt to avoid them. The organizations would need to be aware that the information being spread is subject to distortions and take appropriate measures to limit such. Therefore, the social media is effective for transmitting information to the consumer but its efficiency is debatable. The efficacy of the social media for business is crucial when sending out important messages. Its benefits do not solely rely on setting a primary source to reach out to the younger generations, but it can be used provocatively to stimulate all the users to understand critical information about an organization such as making the people aware of the counterfeit products. The important information would receive a better response as compared to broadcasting since it would enable the intended users to act in real time and express their opinions that could be later used for analysis and improving the modes of communication. The social media enhances self-policing that can greatly enhance a business when appropriately applied (Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development [OECD], 2011, 118 – 119). Conclusion This paper has demonstrated that the social media is making a large impact in all people’s lives today both in the professional and personal aspects of life. The development of the internet technology has facilitated the interactive platforms of the social media where entities modify, create, and publish content that is generated independently. As the KPMG International Cooperative (2011, 2) states, businesses have turned to recognize the participation in the social media as an essential imperative of practice. The social media is exhibits an element of self-policing and real time interactions that can be greatly increase the productivity of a company when appropriately used. References Briguglio, C. 2007. educating the business graduate of the 21st century: communication for a globalized world. International Journal of Teaching and Learning in Higher Education. 19 (1): pp. 8-20. Accessed t http://espace.library.curtin.edu.au/cgi-bin/espace.pdf?file=/2011/10/26/file_1/165593 Dam, R., Nelson, E., & Lozinski, Z. 2008. The changing face of communication: Social networking's growing influence on telecom providers. IBM Global Business Services. Accesses at https://www-304.ibm.com/easyaccess/fileserve?contentid=170834 Farooq, F., Jan, Z., & Karachi, F. 2012. The impact of social networking to influence marketing through product reviews. ICT Journal, 2(8). Pp. 627 – 637. Accessed at http://esjournals.org/journaloftechnology/archive/vol2no8/vol2no8_2.pdf Global Agenda Council on Social Media, n. d. The impact of digital content: Opportunities and risks of Creating and sharing information online. World Economic Forum. Accessed at https://www.washingtonspeakers.com/images/pdfs/GAC%20Social%20Media%20The%20Impact%20of%20Digital%20Contact.pdf Jurišová, E. 2013. The impact of social networking on business and business ethics. Accessed at http://www.cutn.sk/Library/proceedings/mch_2013/editovane_prispevky/46.%20Juri%C5%A1ov%C3%A1.pdf KPMG International. 2011. KPMG in Australia. Accessed at https://www.kpmg.com/FR/fr/IssuesAndInsights/ArticlesPublications/Documents/Going-social-how-business-are-making-the-most-of-social-media.pdf Merrill, T., Latham, K., Santalesa, R. & Navetta, D. 2011. Social Media: The Business Benefits May Be Enormous, But Can the Risks -- Reputational, Legal, Operational -- Be Mitigated? Information Law Group. Accessed at http://www.acegroup.com/us-en/assets/ace-progress-report-social-media.pdf Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development. 2011. Future global shocks: Improving risk governance preliminary version. Accessed at https://www.hitpages.com/doc/4545378116435968/1#pageTop Rosenfeld, G., Lorsch, J. W., & Khurana, R. 2011. Challenges to business in the twenty-first century. American Academy of Arts & Sciences. Accessed at https://www.amacad.org/pdfs/challenges.pdf Stelzner, M. A. 2012. Social media marketing industry report. Social Media Examiner. Accessed at http://www.socialmediaexaminer.com/SocialMediaMarketingIndustryReport2012.pdf Read More