Social Networks and E-commerce - Example

SOCIAL NETWORKS AND E-COMMERCE Social Networks and E-Commerce Author Author’s Affiliation Date Introduction The arrival of electronic business or e-business age has brought many transformations in the approaches of traditional businesses. Additionally, in a number of businesses, completely new business models have emerged or developed that are presenting substantial scope for reforming the business operations, sales, management, administration, supply chains. Additionally, this also have a great influence on changing the traditional ways of working of value chains and information flows. Since, these all new transformations have offered a lot of facilities in scenario of production and management. Thus, in order to contribute entirely in the modern and up-to-date web based business environment, corporations carry on to make important economic investments, not merely in information and communication technologies (ICTs) however as well in the procedures and people essential to function them. In this scenario social networking is a new emerging term and trend for the effective establishment and presentation of business on the web. However, the paradigm of social networking is new. In addition, the social networking web sites are web based portals those are a new tendency in the development of content rich internet portals. Additionally, the social networking website or online portal is used to join people according to their information, stored in user profiles. Furthermore, these social network user profiles decide the means through which an online user presents themselves to other similar social network users. The most significant unique factor among a variety of sites is the variety of profile information that they store, organize as well as are able to carry out operations on their information. Though, the use of social network in business is new and emerging trend. However, at the present, more web based businesses are making use of the web based portals for advertising, communicating and marketing, dealing with, and making sales. In addition, the new trends of the web based business support through social network are getting more attention of a lot of businesses. This paper presents a detailed analysis of the social networking and its usage for the e-business. The main intention of this paper is to offer a comprehensive overview of the technology areas and social networking structures that are useful to the businesses. Social Networks and E-Commerce According to (Boyd & Ellison, 2007), “social network sites are web-based services that facilitate individuals to perform following tasks”: 1. Build an open or hidden profile inside a bounded system 2. Develop a directory of other people with whom they communicate 3. View and edit their directory of connections and those made by others inside the system. The individuality of social network sites is not that they allow individuals to meet strangers; on the other hand, they facilitate people to build up and make identifiable their social networks. Thus, this can result in communication among users that would not in other ways be made, although that is not the major objective, and these communications are normally between "latent ties" the people sharing some offline connections (Boyd & Ellison, 2007). At the present, the social networking websites have become a family name. Despite the fact that, it is someone’s confidential or professional life, they are in fact wonderful process for communicating with friends, colleagues, and making new relationships online (Sedycias, 2013). Since, a social networking web site is a web site where people are able to develop an online profile; and they mention their interests in profile, as well as they can insert links to other profiles. Typically, the users of social networking sites are able to dispense personal information, encompassing photographs, blog entries and videos. MySpace is an example of social networks, which is very popular in the same way with individuals and with music groups, who are able to market their tour dates, and transfer their songs on their profile pages (Hawkins, 2013). A social networking site is a very helpful and functional way to keep in contact with a large number of people (friends, colleagues, relatives, etc). Since, if someone has some news which he/she needs or wishes to distribute to others, then he/she can insert it on his/her personal bulletin board and it will be transferred or distributed to the people to whom he wants to share. Thus, the social networking sites can play a significant function for meeting with new people, whether on a business or friendship (Hawkins, 2013). In this information technology based era every business is trying to enhance its services and products over its competitors. In this case online support is considered to be a crucial factor of any advertising policy and arrangement. Additionally, companies and industries initiated promotion and publicity operations focused on people with the help of written sources and audio/video channels. However, this policy is expensive and its efficacy is hard to determine. On the other hand, it is generally not obvious that how broadcast marketing will play a major role in the latest information financial condition that allows for exceptionally cooperative and focused interactions. Thus, in this customer-oriented financial system, companies are trying to discover additional money-making methods to promote their business services and products-line, access existing clients, and make new users/clients across the business boundaries (Phillips, McFadden, & Sullins, 2010). In addition, social networking websites facilitate users to communicate with people who exchange or distribute similar ideas or information. Although these websites were originally produced to assist social associations, dealers are recognizing the prospect of these sites to offer the mechanisms to encourage valuable services and products of business. In this scenario, a very popular social networking website in the U.S. is Facebook, which comprises more than 500 million worldwide users. Additionally, the social networking websites similar to Facebook, Flickr and MySpace have turned into a well-liked method to distribute and publicize web based material. Their huge fame has directed to viral marketing methodologies that try to offer useful content, services, effective products and thoughts through these social networking websites. Though, there exists less information openly accessible about viral marketing in the real world as well as not many studies and researches have demonstrated how valuable business data and information moves over an existing web based social network website. On the other hand, the web based social networking capabilities have currently turned into a well-liked manner to exchange and distribute business data. In this scenario, the registered and regular users of social networking websites like Flicker, MySpace, and Facebook form systems/networks of their colleagues. Additionally, people over here distribute, discover, and distribute website data at a huge level. Thus, due to large popularity of these websites corporations utilize them for their business marketing. In addition, they are also used for viral marketing of website content, business products, and supporting operations for instance, several movie studios store and offer promos for their videos on MySpace website (Cha, Mislove, & Gummadi, 2009; Lemel, 2010). Moreover, an imperative and unique characteristic of social networks is the prospect for valuable data and information distribution down the social associations, that is information broadcast amongst associates in social networks, an individual expects with the passage of time. It is extensively supposed that this type of user-to-user interactions, as well known as “rumor” interactions, is able to increase website material, thoughts, or data extensively and swiftly all through the social network. In this scenario, various researches have suggested viral marketing operations to use the rumor consequence. Additionally, during the year 2007, organizations spent $1.2 billion on publicity through web based social networks globally, and this volume is forecasted to go thrice by the end of 2011. However, to date, there exists less data and information openly accessible over viral marketing in the real-world and too little research work has been done to indentify how data and information is distributed on web based social networks (Cha, Mislove, & Gummadi, 2009; Lemel, 2010). Furthermore, e-commerce companies are spending a lot of investment on social media networking websites at a quicker pace like any other type of web based marketing strategy. Few researches through Forrester Research revealed that investment on social network based arrangements will augment from $455 million during the year 2008 to $3.1 billion during the 2014 (which shows a 335% exceptional increase). In addition, just about 25 % of small-scale companies researched by Adology Research stated that they would like to invest much on social network based framework during the year 2011. Moreover, the awareness and adoption of social networking paradigm by the companies reveals the increasing value of the utilization of these social networking capabilities (Lacho & Marinello, 2010). Without a doubt, social media is changing everything about the way people live and communicate within society in a number of areas of life comprising the communications that occur across e-commerce and sellers-buyers. In this scenario, YouTube is one of the most popular social networks that are widely used for video sharing. In May 2010, YouTube attained more than 5.2 billion users daily, which are almost double of the joint viewers of prime-time TV watchers in the three main US TV channels. In the same way, social media is playing a significant role in the business sector. For instance, some of the large size business organizations like that Starbucks and Dell Computer agreed considerable improvements in their marketing capabilities and increases in their sales because of the use of social media. The research has shown that social media support business organizations and individuals with a variety of modern and innovative platforms for collaboration, communication and trading. That’s why top social networking firms such as LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter and YouTube are catching the attention of a large number of individuals and business organizations very quickly, constantly incorporating new and modern features and functionalities that improve e-commerce (Turban, Bolloju, & Liang, 2010; Kim & Srivastava, 2007; Chen, Lai, Goh, & Daud, 2013). In this scenario, the use of social networks for e-commerce is believed to be a revolution directed presently by Facebook (a well-known social networking company which successfully attained more than 500 million users in 2010, and which offers a large number of tools and techniques to support a wide variety of business functions. Additionally, different business organizations can make use of the capabilities offered by the social networks to fit into place people in a number of processes which support not simply in building and maintaining interactive win-win association with customers, scenario, workers and retailers and suppliers, however also in improving the capability of the in-house processes of a business organization (Turban, Bolloju, & Liang, 2010; Kim & Srivastava, 2007; Chen, Lai, Goh, & Daud, 2013). Conclusion In the past few year, the term social network has truned out to be well-known and family name for the majority of people. The use of social media for carrying out business activities has become very common in the past few years. In view of the fact that the majority of people use social networks to stay in touch, communicate and share ideas with friends, colleagues and family members. Hence, the business organizations have started taking benefit of social networks’ increasing popularity. The use of social networks for conducting e-commerce related tasks comes under the domain of social commerce. This paper has presented a detailed analysis of social networks with respect to their use in e-commerce. This paper has shown that the majority of business organizations is adopting social networks for the prmotion of their business. For the successful adoption of social networks for their tasks, business organizations need to follow certain steps. In these steps planning for clear objectives is the most important step. Hence, the use of social networks can play a significant role in the success of e-commerce. References Boyd, D. M., & Ellison, N. B. (2007). Social Network Sites: Definition, History, and Scholarship. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, Volume 13 Issue 1 , 1. Cha, M., Mislove, A., & Gummadi, K. P. (2009). A measurement-driven analysis of information propagation in the flickr social network. WWW '09 Proceedings of the 18th international conference on World wide web (pp. 721-730). ACM New York, USA. Chen, Y. Y., Lai, F. W., Goh, K. N., & Daud, S. C. (2013). The effect of integrating social plugins into e-commerce website: a study on online consumer behaviour. ICUIMC '13 Proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Ubiquitous Information Management and Communication (p. 16). Kota Kinabalu, Malaysia: ACM. Hawkins, K. (2013). What is a Social Networking Site? Retrieved May 12, 2013, from WiseGeek.com: http://www.wisegeek.org/what-is-a-social-networking-site.htm Kim, Y. A., & Srivastava, J. (2007). Impact of social influence in e-commerce decision making. ICEC '07 Proceedings of the ninth international conference on Electronic commerce (pp. 293-302). Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA.: ACM. Lacho, K. J., & Marinello, C. (2010). How small business owners can use social networking to promote their business. The Entrepreneurial Executive , 15, 127-133. Lemel, R. (2010). Social Networking Tools for Marketing Fine Art . Allied Academies International Conference: Proceedings of the Academy of Marketing Studies (AMS), Volume 15 Issue 2, 31-34. Phillips, M., McFadden, D. T., & Sullins, M. (2010). How Effective Is Social Networking for Direct Marketers? Journal of Food Distribution Research, Volume 41 Issue 1, 96-100. Sedycias, R. (2013). Security Issues on Social Network Websites. Retrieved May 10, 2013, from EZineArticles.com: http://ezinearticles.com/?Security-Issues-on-Social-Network-Websites&id=2871743 Turban, E., Bolloju, N., & Liang, T.-P. (2010). Social commerce: an e-commerce perspective. ICEC '10 Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Electronic Commerce: Roadmap for the Future of Electronic Business (pp. 33-42). Honolulu, Hawaii, USA: ACM. Read More