Hi,
This week’s topic concerns online social networks. I will start with briefly summarizing the articles and what parts interested me and I will end with two social media platforms that I use on a daily basis to manage my own social network.
The first article written by Boyd and Ellison addressed the definition, history and scholarship of Social networks. The writers provided good examples of how organizations that successfully integrated a social media strategy gained an advantage over other organizations. The section on scholarship however was limited and contained only information on how organizations that use social networks could improve the network itself and not as much on how companies could use social media to leverage benefits. This understandable considering that the article was written in 2008 and the potential of social media was still unknown. The article abruptly ends with how scholars have a limited understanding of how social media can be utilized and by whom. A suggestion would be to include a section which contained information on which industry sectors would benefit from social media or existing ideas in progress. It is very unlikely that four years ago, no one had any idea of how social media could be put to use.
The second article written by Borgatti, Mehra, Brass and Lianca is a review of how networks are analysed in social sciences. The article starts with a brief history of how social sciences tried to map out networks and analyse them from an objective point of view. The use of mathematical formula to understand social networks is a good start. However researchers should keep in mind that not all factors can be included and that their research should be viewed from an objective point of view as well as a subjective one. Scientists are researching patterns in structures and how structure influences the behaviors and relationships of the nodes, individuals within that structure. It would be also interesting to conduct research on how to manipulate structures. What factors influence structures? How does (ex)including a factor affect the power division within a structure and how can benefits be leveraged from this.
The final article written by Kauffman, Li and van Heck concerns value creation in electronic commerce through business networks. The article consists of three propositions and theories and cases to support them. An interesting proposition concerns the process standards support (P1b). What are high business standards? Why these standards? Being able to answer these questions could help companies connect to even larger networks or become a bridge between networks.
The platforms I picked out are, Raidcall and Steam. Raidcall is a solution for group-based voice-chatting the program might be still unknown to a lot of people since it has only been around for two years. However within those two years, Raidcall has gained over ten million registered users and it is still growing. Steam is an online digital distribution platform for games. As of 2011 Steam has over 40 million registered users, their year-over-year sales increase by a hundred percent and they distribute over 1500 games and these numbers are still increasing as we speak. I will provide a comparison based on why social networks are formed within these two platforms, the complexity of a network, the frequency, the quality of information that travels and how the companies leverage benefits from this.
