Impact of Social Networking on e-business

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  1. CSE 306 Research

  1. Portfolio Part 1

  1. Research Paper

Impact of Social Networking on

e-Business


  1. Abstract

The advent of the web2.0 has resulted in the upsurge of users onto the internet through their daily activities on social networking sites. Business firms in search of suitable means to strengthen the relationship between their customers and suppliers have sought to achieve this through such social networks. This paper examines the impact of social networks on e-business within firms, discussing some opportunities and possible risks firms could be exposed to.


  1. 1.0 Introduction

S

ince the advent of web2.0, the internet has evolved from static screenfulls to real time interactions between users, resulting in a new internet ecosystem characterized by social collaborative technologies. The advancement of such technologies has led to the emergence of new subsidiaries of network sociology based on traditional and modern complex networks such as social network sites (SNSs), blogs, wikis, folksonomy etc. the fast pace at which these SNSs are growing in recent years has resulted in several Online Social Networks (OSN) such as Facebook, Friendster, Hi5, MySpace, to mention but a few.

Social networking (SN) may be defined as an internet based collection of individuals, organizations or other social entities that are interconnected through meaningful relationships that allow them to share profile information, resources and expertise amongst their circle of connections as well as view and traverse their list of connections and those made by others within the system. (Lea et al., 2006; Boyd & Ellison, 2007)

The emergence of OSNs has and continues to attract a large number of the general public onto the internet. Millions of users, having joined SNSs such as Facebook, MySpace, Friendster and the likes, have integrated the usage of these sites into their day to day activities. Records show that, a sizeable percentage of users join SNSs each year and this number continues to escalate due to SNSs gaining popularity amongst all demographics. As identified by Steinfield et al. (2009) based on Comscore estimation, Facebook and MySpace have each boosted their user population by 100 million users since 60million in 2008.

Undoubtedly, Social Networking (SN) has become the widely accepted means of communicating and sharing information over an online community. This presents an opportunity and a challenge for e-business operations within organizations. Indeed, the situation serves as an opportunity for organizations because it provides a global audience for relatively lower advertising cost than conventional advertisements on radio, TV, newspapers etc. It has also created the medium for users to share information about products and services offered by organizations thereby increasing the popularity of businesses online (Harris et al, 2009).

On the other hand, it is a challenge because these social networks usually have several applications which members become so engrossed into hence, the probability that they may not even notice the advertisements. Nonetheless, the countless risks involved as to whether organizations will thrive on the web front is an issue on its own.

This paper intends to examine the impact of SN on E-Business. It achieves this purpose with a background study on SN and then proceeds to list out some opportunities, benefits and risks that its applications offers. Afterwards, an evaluation of its impact on e-business and e-commerce is presented stating both negative and positive impacts. Finally, a conclusion is drawn regarding the major issues in the paper.  

  1. 2.0 History of Social Network Sites

  1. 2.1 History

E-mails were one of the dominant means of communication even before the internet came to exist. Several other technologies have contributed to the communication principles present amongst current social networking sites. One of these technologies is Usenet. Established in 1980 even before the World Wide Web, it is one of the oldest internet based communication systems(Schelling, 2007). Its advent allowed users to post ‘articles’ organized into categories called ‘newsgroups’.

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In 1988 a Finish programmer, Jarkko Oikariene invented the Internet Relay Chat which out classed Usenet due to its feature of real time conversation amongst users. Joining IRC required users to create accounts and specify user names.

However, Mirabilis, an Israeli company took over the competition from IRC due to its unregulated nature with the creation of ICQ in 1996. ICQ offered anonymity and allowed users to control whom they communicated with. The later years of 1998 after ICQs acquisition by AOL saw a stampede of IMs flooding the internet.

People afterwards started creating homepages and blogs to express ...

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