Social Media Services and
Business
©FlatWorld 2021
Introduction
• Web 2.0: Internet services that foster collaboration and
information sharing.
• Much of what was often called Web 2.0 is now
categorized as social media: Content that is created,
shared and commented on by a broader community of
users.
• peer production: Collaboration between users to create
content, products, and services.
• Leveraged to create open source software that supports
many of the Internet’s largest sites.
• collaborative consumption: Participants share access to
products and services, rather than having ownership.
©FlatWorld 2021
Introduction (cont’d)
• The social media revolution was
quick and unexpected, and deeply
impactful.
• As of early 2021, five of the top ten
most popular Internet sites in the
world focused on social media, peer-
produced content.
• Nine of the top ten most downloaded
apps were social.
• The social landscape can change
with whip-crack speed (TikTok).
• Social apps exploded when the world
was home with COVID-19 (Zoom).
• Social value extends to business
users, too (Microsoft acquired
©FlatWorld 2021
LinkedIn and GitHub).
Introduction (cont’d)
• The social media revolution was
quick and unexpected, and deeply
impactful (cont’d).
• In corporate social, Salesforce
acquired top-ranked business
messaging app Slack.
• Wikipedia has consistently remained
one of the five most popular Internet
sites.
• YouTube was purchased by Google for
1.65 billion.
• Roughly one in three people on earth
are Facebook users.
• China’s Tencent owns three of the
world’s top five social platforms: QQ,
©FlatWorld 2021 Qzone, and WeChat.
Introduction (cont’d)
• The social media revolution was quick and unexpected,
and deeply impactful (cont’d).
• For many, social media is the “newspaper,” the “news magazine,”
or the “news program.
• Rise of social media as a news source has led to the plague of
“fake news.”
• Facebook and Twitter have become activist tools.
• Websites Stack Overflow and GitHub have emerged as critically
important software developer learning tools.
• Pinterest became the fastest growing website of all time.
• Social media is driving a source in gaming (Zynga, Fortnite).
• Dating apps are also inherently social and very big money (Tinder,
Bumble).
©FlatWorld 2021
Blogs (Definitions)
• blogs: Online journal entries, usually made in reverse
chronological order. Blogs typically provide comment
mechanisms where users can post feedback for authors
and readers.
• long tail: Phenomenon whereby firms can make money
by offering a near-limitless selection of contents and
products.
• trackbacks: Links in a blog post that refer readers back
to cited sources.
• blog rolls: List of a blogger’s favorite blogs.
©FlatWorld 2021
Blogs
• Key features of blogs
• Immediate and unfiltered publication. The ability to reach the
public without limits on publication size and without having posts
filtered, edited, or cut by the mainstream media.
• Ease of use. Creating a new post usually involves clicking a
single button.
• Comment threads. Readers can offer comments on posts.
• Reverse chronology. Posts are listed in reverse order of creation,
making it easy to see the most recent content.
• Persistence. Posts are maintained indefinitely at locations
accessible by permanent links.
• Searchability. Current and archived posts are easily searchable.
• Tags. Posts are often classified under an organized tagging
scheme.
• Trackbacks. Allow an author to acknowledge the source of an
©FlatWorld 2021 item in their posts, which allows bloggers to follow the popularity
of their posts among other bloggers.
Wikis
• wiki: A website that can be modified by anyone, from
directly within a Web browser (provided that the user is
granted edit access).
• Acts as a collective corporate memory that is vital for
sharing skills, learning, and preserving expertise.
• The largest and most popular wiki is Wikipedia. Other
examples:
• Wine Wiki for oenophiles
• Brikipedia for Lego enthusiasts
• Wookieepedia, the Star Wars wiki
• Wikis support what you see is what you get (WYSIWYG)
editing that, while not as robust as traditional word
processors, is still easy enough for most users to grasp.
©FlatWorld 2021
Wikis (cont’d)
• roll back: Ability to revert a wiki page to a prior version.
• Useful for restoring earlier work in the event of a posting error,
inaccuracy, or vandalism.
• Key features of wikis
• All changes are attributed, so others can see who made a given
edit.
• A complete revision history is maintained so changes can be
compared against prior versions and rolled back as needed.
• Automatic notification and monitoring of updates.
• All pages in a wiki are searchable.
• Specific wiki pages can be classified under an organized tagging
scheme.
©FlatWorld 2021
Wikis (cont’d)
• wikimasters: Individuals often employed by organizations
to review community content. They are employed to:
• Delete excessive posts
• Move commentary to the best location
• Edit as necessary
• At Wikipedia, pages are regularly altered by griefers:
Internet vandal and mischief makers.
• Such changes are often recognized in seconds and rolled back.
©FlatWorld 2021
Don’t Underestimate the Power of Wikipedia
• Wikipedia is the first-choice
reference site for a generation of
“netizens.”
• Entries can impact nearly all large-
sized organizations.
• Firms must also monitor their online
reputations in wikis.
• neutral point of view (NPOV):
Editorial style that is free of bias
and opinion. Wikipedia norms Source: monticello/Shutterstock.com
dictate that all articles must be
written in NPOV.
• Firms that overreach and try to
influence an entry outside of NPOV
©FlatWorld 2021 risk a backlash and public exposure.
Social Networks
• social networks: An online community that allows users
to establish a personal profile and communicate with
others. Large public social networks include Facebook,
LinkedIn, Google+, and Pinterest.
• Feeds are a powerful feature of social networks:
• Provides a timely list of the activities of and public messages
from people, groups, and organizations that an individual has an
association with.
• viral: Information or applications that spread rapidly
between users.
• Feeds can also be controversial:
• Users can react negatively to a public broadcast of their online
activity.
©FlatWorld 2021
• Feed mismanagement can create accusations of spamming,
public relations snafus, user discontent, and can potentially open
Social Networks (cont’d)
• Key features
• Detailed personal profiles
• Affiliations with groups (e.g., alumni, employers, hobbies, fans,
health conditions, causes); with individuals (e.g., specific
“friends”); and with products, firms, and other organizations
• Private messaging and public discussions
• Media sharing (text, photos, video)
• Discovery-fueling feeds of recent activity among members (e.g.,
status changes, new postings, photos, applications installed)
©FlatWorld 2021
Corporate Use of Social Networks
• Many firms are choosing to implement their own internal
social network platforms that they hope are more secure
and tailored to firm needs.
• Firms such as Deloitte, Dow Chemical, and Goldman Sachs have
created social networks for “alumni” who have left the firm or
retired.
• Useful for maintaining future business leads, rehiring former
employees, or recruiting retired staff to serve as contractors when
labor is tight.
• For IBM, where many employees regularly work from home or
client locations, social networking:
• Makes it easier to locate employee expertise within the firm.
• Organize virtual work groups.
• Communicate across large distances.
• Firms have also created their own online communities to foster
©FlatWorld 2021
brainstorming and customer engagement.
Twitter and the Rise of Microblogging
• Twitter is a microblogging service
that allows users to post 280-
character messages (tweets) via the
Web, SMS, or a variety of third-party
desktop and smartphone apps.
• Has 330 million monthly active users.
• Over 500 million tweets are sent each
day.
• Allows direct posting of video captured
and edited within the Twitter app.
• Allows for asymmetrical following.
• Comments classified with hashtags:
Method for organizing tweets where
keywords are preceded by the #
character.
©FlatWorld 2021
Twitter and the Rise of Microblogging (cont’d)
• Firms leverage Twitter for:
• Real-time promotion
• Time-sensitive information
• Customer engagement and support
• Scheduling and yield management
• Promotion
• Intelligence gathering
• Idea sourcing
• As a sales channel
Source: Travel man/Shutterstock.com
©FlatWorld 2021
Organic Reach and Advertising
• Firms are reaching fewer and fewer of
their fans because Facebook’s
algorithms have decreased the reach of
fan page posts.
• Twitter’s timeline used to be
chronological, but has shifted to an
algorithmic timeline.
• It will first show tweets from people you
interact with as well as some of the more
popular recent tweets from those you follow.
• By surfacing popular posts, Twitter becomes
even more or a virality machine.
• Tweeting during televised events have a high
degree of Twitter (e.g., sporting events,
awards shows).
©FlatWorld 2021
Organic Reach and Advertising (cont’d)
• Twitter sells products to boost
organic sharing.
• Allows top advertisers to create
limited-time custom emojis.
• Offers mechanisms to promote
tweets.
• Users don’t have to be followers
to see a firm’s ad.
• Offers extensive targeting.
• All ads are targeted as
“promoted,” but appear in the
user’s Twitter stream.
©FlatWorld 2021
Organic Reach and Advertising (cont’d)
• Advertisers can promote tweets to any user based on:
• Geography
• Language
• Keywords
• Interests
• Device type
• Matching e-mail addresses to those in their CRM
• Ads are billed on pay per performance, when users
engage by:
• Clicking on a tweet
• Retweeting a promotion
• Replying
• Favoriting/Following
©FlatWorld 2021
Organic Reach and Advertising (cont’d)
• Twitter’s fast-growing MoPub service:
• Connects advertisers that use ad networks like Google’s AdMob, Apple’s
iAd, and Facebook’s Audience Network with firms that want to auction off
ad space in their apps and services.
• Leverages data to make money without running more ads on its own
service.
• Twitter pioneered an innovative software development kit for app
developers, SDK: Tools that allow the creation of products or add-
ons for a specific operating system of other computing platform.
• Video accounts for more than half of all Twitter advertising
revenue.
• Promoted video—advertisers pay Twitter to show videos inside a user’s
feed.
• Amplify—offers a pre-roll advertiser in front of a publisher’s video clip.
• Sells video sponsorships for its live-streamed shows.
©FlatWorld 2021
Tackling Trolls and Battling Bots
• Twitter has become a vehicle for
foreign governments and
purveyors of “fake news.”
• 2018 propaganda account linked to
the Russian government.
• Automated “bots” used to sow
confusion during the 2016 U.S.
presidential election.
• Struggled to balance free speech
and editorial neutrality with
identifying and dealing with online
abuse.
©FlatWorld 2021
Prediction Markets and the Wisdom of
Crowds
• wisdom of crowds: Idea that a group of individuals, often
consisting of untrained amateurs, will collectively have
more insight than a single or small group of trained
professionals.
• prediction market: Polling a diverse crowd and
aggregating opinions in order to form a forecast of an
eventual outcome.
©FlatWorld 2021
Prediction Markets and the Wisdom of Crowds
(cont’d)
• In an article in the McKinsey Quarterly, Surowiecki
outlined several criteria necessary for a crowd to be
“smart.” The crowd must:
• be diverse, so that participants are bringing different pieces of
information to the table,
• be decentralized, so that no one at the top is dictating the
crowd’s answer,
• offer a collective verdict that summarizes participant opinions,
• be independent, so that each focuses on information rather than
the opinions of others.
©FlatWorld 2021
Blockchain for Better and Unrestricted
Prediction Markets
• A centralized prediction market with wager-style
payouts would be easy for a government to shut down.
• Some developers feel that decentralization is the key to
viable, large-scale prediction markets, and turning to
blockchain technology.
• Augur, Gnosis, and Stox are demonstrating technology to support
this.
• Microsoft offers tools on its cloud platform, Azure.
• Fees for transactions handled by blockchain versus centralized
markets are lower.
• Instead of a single authority verifying the outcome, the crowd
will collectively verify the result, with participant reputation also
gaining value with the accuracy of a reported outcome.
©FlatWorld 2021
Crowdsourcing
• crowdsourcing: The act of taking
a job traditionally performed by a
designated agent (usually an
employee) and outsourcing it to
an undefined, generally large
group of people in the form of an
open call.
• Crowdsourcing success:
• Goldcorp—offered up all their data
and offered prize money for the best
ideas—in a few years, the firm grew
into a $9 billion titan.
• Israeli firm Waze—used
crowdsourcing to build a better map
©FlatWorld 2021 —bought by Google for $1 billion.
Crowdsourcing (cont’d)
• Nine of the world’s top ten brands have engaged in some
form of crowdsourcing.
• McDonald’s in Germany—build a burger recipe, resulted in
Pretzelnator.
• Netflix—improving the accuracy of movie recommendations by 10
percent.
• Leveraged by several public markets:
• For innovation
• As an alternative to standard means of production
• Not all crowdsourcing is financially motivated.
• Some benefit by helping to create a better service.
©FlatWorld 2021
