Social Networks are making a Beneficial Impact on the Social Aspects of Business but Threaten Privacy

SOCIAL NETWORKS USE ADS, RELATIONSHIP TOOLS, AND CONTACT INFORMATION TO BENEFIT BUSINESS

The large majority of social networks out today sell ad space that uses your contact information for marketing purposes. Social networks create a stronger sense of targeting the customer because social networks use the activities, links, etc. that you address in your personal pages in their ads. The number one example of this is Facebook, the number one social network used worldwide. Facebook sells its ad space so that it can stay free and this helps the business world because firms are always trying to market themselves and get their name out.  This is a large benefit to firms because a lot of websites do not offer ad space and it is like using an internet billboard when you advertise on a social network. Check out here how Facebook actually allows users to create ads themselves and it allows the options of targeting by your interests, age, gender, and workplace. 

Another major part of social networks is that they help the business world create relationships.  LinkedIn is the largest business based social networking website and it allows users to connect with people in the business world so that it is easier to make a relationship with a co-worker or an employer/employee.  This is beneficial if someone is applying to a job because then the employer knows more about the employee already and the employer can make a decision faster.  It is also beneficial if two separate departments are paired to work on one project and the workers do not know each other. LinkedIn can help make a business more organized because workers will not have to meet the moment they begin working together which will speed up the work process. They can understand the other person to an extent prior to working together. This article demonstrates how it makes it easier for employers to find employees by allowing the employer to search by keywords, past employers, references, and more. This graphic from this article should help demonstrate how many people you can reach from your own business contacts and how many people can reach you from their business contact(s): 

In an interview with Dr. Brian Butler, associate professor of information systems at the University of Maryland, the benefits for certain firms in ads, relationships and organization are described as all being beneficial to the business world:

SOCIAL NETWORKS NEED TO BALANCE AMOUNT OF ADS WITH ENJOYMENT SO CUSTOMERS STAY

Think about how often the average computer savvy person uses a social network.  Now look at this picture of my Facebook page:

Notice that (through the blur for privacy’s sake) there are ads covering the entire right side of the page.  From a business standpoint, you need these ads to continue running Facebook for free yet from a customer’s standpoint, these ads are annoying and majority of the time you completely ignore them. So how do we balance both of these in order to effectively use ads for revenue to satisfy the network and not turn away the customer?

Looking at it from a journalism standpoint, as the professor of Info 3.0 at the University of Maryland Ron Yaros points out, social networks are run by the PICK Model (Personalization, Interactivity, Contiguity, and Kickouts). Every social networking page needs to balance the amount of personalization, interactivity and contiguity with the amount of kickouts because too much of one will either turn away the customer or shut down the network. Facebook is a classic example of a social network that has balanced the two so that there are few enough kickouts along with a lot of personalization (your Facebook page), interactivity (others’ Facebook pages), and contiguity (pictures of people at a party you were at). The problem is that in order for social networks to keep their privacy settings slightly slim in order to not turn away customers and satisfy the ad companies with the knowledge of what ads to use.

SOCIAL NETWORKS MUST SLOWLY CHANGE PRIVACY SETTINGS TO KEEP CUSTOMERS

                Facebook is probably the best culprit of the idea of slowly changing their privacy settings so that users slowly lose privacy without knowing.  Facebook updates its privacy settings very often and they make slight changes each time so that users do not really realize.  Facebook’s new privacy settings have gone under a lot of heat recently because they are disclosing a lot of information specific to users to advertising companies. This is good for Facebook because it helps them advertise and make it easier for companies to advertise but it also is bad because it turns away some users because they do not like being that public.  Butler said in an interview that, “If information is not public, they lose customers because they want to attract as many eyeballs as possible.”  So if the social network makes very private, no advertisers will be able to reach users which hurts their revenue but helps their PICK model to the user.

SOCIAL NETWORKS HELP THE BUSINESS WORLD YET TAKE AWAY PRIVACY

                As long as social networks continue to dominate the internet domain, they will continue to make beneficial impacts on the business world but will have to continue to take away some of our privacy. Even though this is good for the business world, many of the users that these networks have will be turned away. Social networks will need to make decisions based on the business idea of ads and the PICK model idea of ads as well. Taking both of these into account is the tough part but if it is done correctly, the social networks that do it correctly will flourish and the others will perish.