Bittersweet Social Media by Valerio Cirella - HTML preview

Chapter One

Social Media Today

This chapter opens with a definition of social media and with a list of medium which are part of this category. The main arguments are around what the most popular medium is nowadays, and how and why it has become successful.

The main success of social media is due to social networks, which are based on the theory of “six degrees of separation”. Social media are also used in many situations and for different scopes that will be described in the last section.

1.1 Phenomenon Definition

In my view, social media are virtual communities and networks that support the communication and the sharing of ideas and data between people (users).

Social media (SM) represent the newest media developed and used nowadays for communication between people. The most common social platforms used are quite young: for example, MySpace was founded in 2003, Facebook in 2004, YouTube in 2005, and Twitter in 2006. The full potential and comprehension of this new way of communication is not yet well perceived by the majority of people.

While they are used widely — for example, Facebook has an average of 802 m daily active users (Facebook, 2014), LinkedIn has 300 m members (LinkedIn, 2014), and WhatsApp has more than 100 m users (Forbes, 2012) — only a reduced number of users know what SM really represent today from a political, economic and social point of view. Instead, the majority of users associate SM only with social networks (SNs) or online news channels.

This chapter explains what the differences are between SM and SNs. As a starting point, Sterne (2010) defines SM as a group of Medium, which is represented in Fig. 1.

Source: Team YS, 2013

Figure 1 – SM channels

The following details give greater clarifications on each role and characteristic:

• Social Blogs and Weblogs. These are websites run by an individual or small group of writers, which provide comments or news on facts and events that would interest a particular community. Usually, blogs create information and support idea–sharing, and readers can post comments regarding the topics covered.
• Microblogging. These are blogs that use a limited number of characters. The most well-known one is Twitter, which uses only 140 characters per message.
• Social Bookmarking. These are websites that are focused on bookmarks and web documents that users can share and edit. Pinterest, Digg and Fark are examples of social bookmarking. There is not shared data, but only references to other web pages. Typically, public libraries use those platforms to speed up catalogue research.
• Internet Forums. These are websites, or parts of websites, dedicated to specific topics such as getting advice or solving problems. For example, mobile phone providers have webpages dedicated to providing information such as: service numbers and the procedure to deactivate/activate a service. Other examples are: Yahoo Forums, and boards on the WikiHow.com website.
• Rating. The most common are the ones used to book holidays, review restaurants and buy goods (e.g. eBay, Amazon, Airbnb and Alibaba).

In addition to the list above, there are other categories to consider, such as:

• Social Networks (SNs). These are applications dedicated to people’s connections (personal and/or professional). Users invite people to join their network in order to read their professional and private life updates and progression, and to seek opinions and information. SNs support interactions between users through the sharing of: comments, opinions, videos, images and personal status updates. SNs are convenient because they are cheap or free, and quick and easy to use. They are either public or private (invitation only) communities. In this category, instant chat applications are also included because they share the same characteristics: they allow connections and sharing of digital material.
• Sharing Platforms. Examples are: OneDrive, Dropbox, Google Drive and YouTube. These are cloud applications, which allow the uploading and downloading of digital content and to view streaming content.

Marketing Charts (2015) reports the ranking of most used social media website of November 2015 and, from this particular list, Facebook is the leader, followed by You Tube and Twitter (see Fig. 2).

Source: Marketing Charts, 2015

Figure 2 - Top 10 Visited Multi-Platform Social-Networking Websites & Forum

1.1.1 Facebook

Facebook (FB) is the market leader of SNs, with a really impressive popularity. According to the company’s data release, FB had 1.01 billion daily active users on average for September 2015. It is an American company but the 83.5% of the daily users are based outside USA & Canada.

FB was founded by Mark Zuckerberg, a Harvard student, with the initial idea to profile students and staff of his college. Soon, the website became very popular and he extended access to other colleges, and gradually the application became international and accessible to everyone.

The original business idea, which made Facebook a $ 2.5 b company (Facebook, 2014), was created and developed without market research or a business plan.

There are few points that make Facebook the number one in the entire SM:

1. The founder believes strongly in the realisation of an idea; the best business idea is nothing without an execution.

2. The FB application is easy to use and intuitive. When the company decides to improve the web site, the simplicity is the first approach.

3. Service is reliable (minor crashes) and easy to access. Since its creation, FB has moved forward, but always keeps in mind to guarantee access to the service.

4. Focus on the product and service quality. Zuckerberg always been focused on his product, considering profits as less important. In this way, the company creates a real value for customers, and this leads to the generation of more business by itself.

5. Hire and retain the best employees on the market and be ready to replace them when needed. This has contributed to developing FB to be the successful company it is today.

6. Zuckerberg has had full company control since the company was created. This has helped the company growth because decisions are made quickly and the company vision is clear and achievable.

7. Keep the focus on innovation in order to keep the business going. FB is a company which