Introduction
According to Hansen et al. (2010), social media is affecting corporations from multiple dimensions. Services such as Facebook and Twitter are highly focused on encouraging collaboration among employees, customers, and partners as well as acquiring new customers.
It is increasingly becoming a way of life for employees, customers, partners, and competitors. Employees want to work differently while customers want to buy and be served differently. As a result, companies need cultures that can adapt to social media as integral to the organization.
In many organizations, such cultural change could mean significant transformation. Developing a culture that embraces social media requires changes to a company’s human capital strategy from role definition to recruiting, development, and rewards as well as incentives.
However, benefits come naturally when cultural change is addressed and social media is well implemented.
Leveraging Social Media and Networking Technologies
In general, many organizations initially struggle with the concept of introducing social media such as Facebook and Twitter.
Among the greatest concerns are the legal aspects of enterprise social media solutions. Oftentimes, organizations take all the necessary precautions to avert legal tussles.
Some executives are afraid that the use of social media will require significant overhead to audit and police employee contributions. One common concern among executives is that social networking tools that are not mediator moderated would enable employees to complain or make negative comments about the company and expose the business to legal risks.
Executives also worry about the fact that employee productivity can be degraded.
Company culture and policies can also hinder social media adoption and collaboration among employees.
Social Media Analysis
Social network analysis is the application of the broader field of network science to the study of human relationships and connections (Hansen et al., 2010).
Social networks are ancient and have a history that long predates systems like Facebook and Twitter, and even the first email message.
Ever since anyone exchanged help with anyone else, social networks have existed, even if they were mostly invisible.
Social networks are created from any collection of connections among a group of people and things.
Today, we use social networks to bring families and friends together, reach out to neighbors and colleagues, and revitalize markets for products and services.
Social media are used to create connections that can bind local regions and span continents. These connections range from the trivial to the most valued potent collaborations, relationships, and communities.
Unheard of just a few years ago, Facebook and Twitter are now headline news with social and political implications that spread around the globe.
Despite the very different shapes, sizes, and goals of the institutions involved in social media, the common structure that unifies all social media spaces is a social network.
Although social media are visible in the form of consumer applications such as Facebook and Twitter, significant use of social media tools takes place behind the firewalls that surround most corporations, institutions, and organizations.
Inside these organizations, employees can share documents, post messages, and engage in extensive discussions. They can also create extensive patterns of connections with other employees and resources.
Social media tools cultivate internal discussions that can help to improve quality, lower costs, and enable the creation of customer and partner communities that offer new opportunities for coordination, marketing, advertising, and customer support.
Advantages of Social Media
Both Facebook and Twitter are social networking sites that are useful for creating a platform for employees with similar interests to interact without the restriction of boundaries. The objects below show how fast the two social networks have grown over the years.
Social networking also helps employees to share their knowledge and expertise with colleagues. Employees who need the knowledge for various purposes thus get to benefit. Social networking also serves to redefine the identity of employees in a social context. An employee who belongs to a particular interest group which is a part of a social network represents a character of the employee’s personality and becomes an integral part of his or her identity. Social networks are also viral in nature as much effort is not required to build it. They can also enable an organization to create virtual working groups by linking employees scattered in different company locations across the world.
Disadvantages of Social Media
At times, social media turns out to be very time consuming while not giving much in return. As a result, social networks do not come out as efficient systems to be used in organizations.
Although social networking is generally used to gain knowledge and expertise, it is mostly used as a platform for fun and this makes it lose its productivity.
Social networking sometimes leads to undesirable social interactions which make it boring and create fatigue.
Social networks may also be used by disgruntled employees to slander an organization and ruin its reputation.
There is also a danger of employee private data being disclosed either accidentally or intentionally to unauthorized people.
In some cases, employees over-rely on social networks to interact and deliberately avoid personal face-to-face encounters, leading to an increase of shallow relationships.
Implementing Facebook and Twitter
Both Facebook and Twitter technologies will be deployed in the company following the system development life cycle (SDLC) methodology. The systems development life cycle is a multistage process that guides management through the development or purchase of information systems.
Typically, the SDLC includes planning, analysis, design, development, testing, implementation, and maintenance stages. To implement Facebook or Twitter in the company, therefore, the above stages will have to be followed. These are explained as follows.
Planning
This is the staring point of the SDLC, and regardless of what the end result is supposed to be, it is a very critical stage. Without proper planning, the entire implementation stage can easily fail to meet the required standard.
The importance of this stage springs from the fact that before moving any further, the company needs to know what will be involved. It will also be important to have a clear picture of the activities to be undertaken, the person or people to be in charge, and the correct recipe for success.
Analysis
This is the next stage that comes after planning. Part of what is involved in this stage is to understand what the users’ requirements are.
It is important for implementers to know the business of the company and how Facebook and Twitter will be used to improve performance.
A successful analysis will, therefore, take into consideration, inputs from all expected users.
Design
This is the third stage which requires the implementers to outline the critical design features of the social network media. It is necessary to know what Facebook and Twitter can offer and generate a list of desired design characteristics for the company. This may include an assessment of available security features as well as privacy requirements.
It may also be necessary to note the undesirable features and devise ways to avoid them in the customized Facebook and Twitter systems.
Development
The development stage involves coming up with the required product based on the design specification.
However, since Facebook and Twitter are existing social networks, the company only needs to customize them to meet specific requirements.
At this point, the implementers will need to ensure that all the key requirements are taken into consideration. This includes ensuring that security and privacy requirements are reinforced.
Testing
At the advice of the implementing team, users may be given an opportunity to try out the customized Facebook and Twitter system to determine whether the desired requirements were fully met as originally envisioned.
In case of any challenges or deficiencies, these must be immediately addressed and the systems should be refined in order to meet the expectations of the company.
Implementation
Once the proposed Facebook and Twitter designs have been successfully tested and end users are happy with the ingrained features, it is now time for implementation in order to allow the full use of the chosen social networking systems.
Maintenance
Though it appears last, maintenance has to be ongoing. The organization will be expected to ensure that a team is put in place to constantly monitor the use of both Facebook and Twitter systems and to deal with any emerging issues.
In case of any challenges or deficiencies, a review of the systems may be undertaken so as to fine tune them and bring them to a level where they can fully satisfy the user needs.
Other tasks to be looked into at this point include the need for additions, upgrades, or updates that will ensure improved performance and build user confidence.
Reference
Hansen, D., Shneiderman, B. & Smith, M. A. (2010). Analyzing Social Media Networks with NodeXL: Insights from a Connected World. Burlington, MA: Morgan Kaufmann.