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www.downloadslide.net CHAPTER 8 Alex Slobodkin/iStockphoto Social Computing CHAPTER OUTLINE 8.1 Web 2.0 8.2 Fundamentals of Social Computing in Business 8.3 Social Computing in Business: Shopping 8.4 Social Computing in Business: Marketing 8.5 Social Computing in Business: Customer Relationship Management L E ARNI NG O BJ E CTI VE S 8.1 Describe six Web 2.0 tools and two major types of Web 2.0 sites. 8.2 Describe the benefits and risks of social commerce to companies. 8.3 Identify the methods used for shopping socially. 8.4 Discuss innovative ways to use social networking sites for advertising and market research. 8.5 Describe how social computing improves customer service. 8.6 Discuss different ways in which human resource managers make use of social computing. 8.6 Social Computing in Business: Human Resource Management Opening Case Social Commerce Company Teespring MIS Plans to Become a Platform POM Social commerce company Teespring (http://teespring.com) is one of the leading T-shirt manufacturers and sellers in the United States. In 2014, the company printed more than seven million T-shirts. Regardless of the T-shirt design, social commerce Web site Teespring either has a design, or it will help independent contractors design and make the T-shirt, sell it, and take a percentage. In fact, hundreds of people made more than $100,000 in 2014 selling tees through the com­ pany’s Web site and 20 earned more than $1 million. Teespring says that about 60 percent of its sales come through ads on social media, with approximately 20 percent of the people who buy Teespring tees sharing their purchases on Facebook. 209 www.downloadslide.net 210 CHAPT ER 8 Social Computing Teespring’s full-time employees serve as the back-office staff for independent designers, operating their online sales, making and shipping the tees, processing payments, and managing customer service. Teespring charges designers about $9 per shirt, depending on the quality of the cotton and the complexity of the design. The designers set the retail price and earn the difference. Teespring prints shirts only when a customer has placed an online order. As a result, the company and its designers are not left with unsold inventory. This process is an excellent example of mass customization, or make-to­ order production. Independent designers use Facebook extensively because the social network’s 1.5 billion users provide such a vast amount of data on what its users like and dislike. In addition, designers use free tools such as Google Trends (www.google.com/trends) and Reddit (www.reddit .com) to identify current trends in specific niches that allows them to identify potential audiences. For example, one designer noticed hundreds of thousands of shares and social engagement regarding images and sayings related to the U.S. women’s soccer team. She then went to Facebook, identified current active groups following the team, and created a large list of people from those groups. She created vari­ ous designs, uploaded them to Teespring, worked with Teespring designers, and marketed the T-shirts that Teespring produced to this passionate audience. Teespring’s annual revenue exceeds $100 million. In 2014, the firm raised approximately $55 million in venture funding and built a 105,000-square-foot printing factory in Kentucky. The company is planning to contract out as little production as possible to other com­ panies, thereby keeping its production costs to a minimum. Further, Teespring wants to have customer service and production in the same facility. If shoppers have questions about an order, or have a problem with an order, it is more efficient for customer service to be co-located with production. What’s next for Teespring? Its production and payments systems could prove invaluable for many more types of entrepreneurs. One of Teespring’s founders noted, “T-shirts are to Teespring what books are to Amazon.” The company’s next step is to go beyond shirts into hats, stickers, posters, and smartphone cases. Essentially, Teespring plans to become a platform for entrepreneurs to create and sell all types of merchandise online. Compare a platform with a traditional business model. A tradi­ tional business produces one or more closely related products or services, then uses marketing to attract customers. By contrast, busi­ nesses using the platform model integrate an increasing number of customers and partners into their ecosystems. A business ecosystem is a network of organizations—including suppliers, distributors, cus­ tomers, competitors, government agencies, and others—involved in the delivery of products and services through both competition and cooperation. Building a powerful platform enables a company’s ecosystem to contribute to innovation. The platform enables other businesses to easily connect their businesses to yours, build products and services on top of your products and services, thus co-creating value. Let’s look at several examples: • In 1998, Google was an excellent search engine, but not yet a platform. By adding features such as Gmail, Google Maps, Google Docs, YouTube, and many others, Google has become a very pow­ erful platform. • By inviting thousands of users to develop apps for its iPhone and iPad, Apple has become a platform and generated billions of dol­ lars in new revenue. • Facebook began as a social networking Web site for college stu­ dents. The firm has become a powerful platform by expanding its offerings to include business and marketing sites, community gaming sites, e-mail, instant messaging, groups, blogs, advertis­ ing, consumer data mining, and many others. • Uber developed a mobile app that allows customers with smartphones to submit a trip request that is then sent to Uber drivers who use their own cars. Uber is rapidly becoming a platform as it begins to offer new services such as postal, gift, and grocery deliv­ ery, as well as limousine and even medical services. Consider this example of Teespring becoming a platform. In May 2015, the firm formed a partnership with music merchandise company Manhead Merchandising (www.manheadmerch.com) to deliver custom clothing for its portfolio of music artists. The partnership enables Manhead to leverage Teespring’s innovative production and payment sys­ tem to expand its electronic commerce business. In addition, artists can sell their own merchandise online with no upfront costs or inven­ tory risk. For example, Manhead artist Fall Out Boy used Teespring to launch a limited-edition T-shirt in a special 24-hour sale. The band pro­ moted this shirt exclusively through its social media channels, gener­ ating $40,000 in sales in a single day. One caveat: Teespring’s expenses are increasing at the same time that Facebook ad rates are rising. Further, the company has to deal with a number of legal complaints about tees that use copyrighted images from movies or sports teams, or images that copy existing top sellers. The company says that its staff members review all designs to avoid incurring liability. Sources: Compiled from S. Perez, “Teespring Eliminates 70 Jobs in Providence as Company Restructures,” TechCrunch, June 24, 2015; K. Mulvaney, “R.I. Startup Teespring Moving Jobs to Kentucky, San Francisco,” Providence Journal, June 24, 2015; “Is Teespring and Facebook Marketing Still Viable in 2015?” CNN News Center, May 28, 2015; “Teespring & Manhead Merchandising Team Up to Create Social Commerce Opportunities for Musicians,” PRNewswire, May 12, 2015; A. Satariano, “How Your T-Shirt Can Make You Rich,” Bloomberg BusinessWeek, April 16, 2015; S. Perez, “Teespring Raises $35 Million Series B from Khosla Ventures as It Prepares to Expand Beyond Apparel,” TechCrunch, November 18, 2014; A. Konrad, “Teespring Says It’s Minting New Millionaires Selling Its T-Shirts, Raises $35 Million of Its Own,” Forbes, November 18, 2014; A. Taub, “Teespring: Is This Rhode Island Based Startup the Future of Custom Apparel?” Forbes, January 3, 2013; http://teespring.com, accessed August 3, 2015. Questions 1. Discuss the relationship between social computing and Teespring’s business model. 2. Explain this statement: “T-shirts are to Teespring what books are to Amazon.” 3. What other products and services can Teespring offer to truly be­ come a platform? www.downloadslide.net I nt ro d u c t io n Introduction Humans are social individuals. Therefore, human behavior is innately social. Humans typically orient their behavior around other members of their community. As a result, people are sen­ sitive to the behavior of people around them, and their decisions are generally influenced by their social context. Traditional information systems support organizational activities and business processes, and they concentrate on cost reductions and productivity increases. A variation of this tradi­ tional model, social computing, is a type of IT that combines social behavior and information systems to create value. Social computing is focused on improving collaboration and interac­ tion among people and on encouraging user-generated content, as you see in this chapter’s opening case. Significantly, in social computing, social information is not anonymous. Rather, it is impor­ tant precisely because it is linked to particular individuals, who in turn are linked to their own networks of individuals. Social computing makes socially produced information available to everyone. This infor­ mation may be provided directly, as when users rate a movie (e.g., at Rotten Tomatoes), or indirectly (as with Google’s PageRank algorithm, which sequences search results). In social computing, users, rather than organizations, produce, control, use, and manage content via interactive communications and collaboration. As a result, social computing is transforming power relationships within organizations. Employees and customers are empow­ ered by their ability to use social computing to organize themselves. Thus, social computing can influence people in positions of power to listen to the concerns and issues of “ordinary peo­ ple.” Organizational customers and employees are joining this social computing phenomenon, with serious consequences for most organizations. Significantly, most governments and companies in modern developed societies are not pre­ pared for the new social power of ordinary people. Today, managers, executives, and govern­ ment officials can no longer control the conversation around policies, products, and other issues. In the new world of business and government, organizational leaders will have to demon­ strate authenticity, even-handedness, transparency, good faith, and humility. If they do not, then customers and employees may distrust them, to potentially disastrous effects. For exam­ ple, customers who do not like a product or service can quickly broadcast their disapproval. Another example is that prospective employees do not have to take their employers at their word for what life is like at their companies—they can find out from people who already work there. A final example is that employees now have many more options to start their own com­ panies, which could compete with their former employers. As you see from these examples, the world is becoming more democratic and reflective of the will of ordinary people, enabled by the power of social computing. On the one hand, social power can help keep a company vital and can enable customers and employee activists to become a source of creativity, innovation, and new ideas that will move a company forward. On the other hand, companies that show insensitivity toward customers or employees quickly find themselves on a downward slide. For instance, Kenneth Cole came under fire for suggesting on Twitter that news of its spring collection led to riots in Egypt, and American Apparel was blasted online for offering a Hurri­ cane Sandy sale. Lesson to be learned: If companies want to win the favor and loyalty of cus­ tomers, they should refrain from making comments that may suggest that they were trying to profit from other people’s misery. Social computing is exploding worldwide, with China having the world’s most active social media population. In one McKinsey survey, 91 percent of Chinese respondents reported that they had visited a social media site in the previous six months, compared with 70 percent in South Korea, 67 percent in the United States, and 30 percent in Japan. Interestingly, the survey found that social media has a greater influence on purchasing decisions for Chinese consumers than for consumers anywhere else in the world. Social computing is also increasing dramatically in Africa. Facebook, YouTube, and Insta­ gram are the leading social networks in African countries. However, Facebook does have rivals 211 www.downloadslide.net 212 CHAPT ER 8 Social Computing in Africa, one of which is Mxit (www.mxit.com). Although Mxit’s active users have fallen to about five million, the social network is among the most engaged in Africa, with the average user sign­ ing in five times per day and spending 105 minutes per day on the site. The chapter opening case illustrates how businesses today are using social computing in a variety of innovative ways, including marketing, production, customer relationship man­ agement, and human resource management. In fact, so many organizations are competing to use social computing in as many new ways as possible that an inclusive term for the use of social computing in business has emerged: social commerce. Because social computing is facil­ itated by Web 2.0 tools and sites, you begin this chapter by examining these technologies. You then turn your attention to a diverse number of social commerce activities, including shop­ ping, advertising, market research, customer relationship management, and human resource management. When you complete this chapter, you will have a thorough understanding of social com­ puting and the ways in which modern organizations use this technology. You will be familiar with the advantages and disadvantages of social computing as well as the risks and rewards it can bring to your organization. For example, most of you already have pages on social network­ ing sites, so you are familiar with the positive and negative features of these sites. This chapter will enable you to apply this knowledge to your organization’s efforts in the social computing arena. You will be in a position to contribute to your organization’s policies on social comput­ ing. You will also be able to help your organization create a strategy to utilize social computing. Finally, social computing offers incredible opportunities for entrepreneurs who want to start their own businesses. 8.1 Web 2.0 The World Wide Web, which you learned about in Chapter 4, first appeared in 1990. Web 1.0 was the first generation of the Web. We did not use this term in Chapter 4 because there was no need to say “Web 1.0” until Web 2.0 emerged. The key developments of Web 1.0 were the creation of Web sites and the commercializa­ tion of the Web. Users typically had minimal interaction with Web 1.0 sites. Rather, they pas­ sively received information from those sites. Web 2.0 is a popular term that has proved difficult to define. According to Tim O’Reilly, a noted blogger, Web 2.0 is a loose collection of information technologies and applications, plus the Web sites that use them. These Web sites enrich the user experience by encouraging user participation, social interaction, and collaboration. Unlike Web 1.0 sites, Web 2.0 sites are not so much online places to visit as Web locations that facilitate information sharing, user-cen­ tered design, and collaboration. Web 2.0 sites often harness collective intelligence (e.g., wikis); deliver functionality as services, rather than packaged software (e.g., Web services); and fea­ ture remixable applications and data (e.g., mashups). In the following sections, we discuss five Web 2.0 information technology tools: tagging, Really Simple Syndication, blogs, microblogs, and wikis. We then turn our attention to the two major types of Web 2.0 sites: social networking sites and mashups. Tagging A tag is a keyword or term that describes a piece of information, for example, a blog, a picture, an article, or a video clip. Users typically choose tags that are meaningful to them. Tagging allows users to place information in multiple, overlapping associations rather than in rigid cat­ egories. For example, a photo of a car might be tagged with “Corvette,” “sports car,” and “Chev­ rolet.” Tagging is the basis of folksonomies, which are user-generated classifications that use tags to categorize and retrieve Web pages, photos, videos, and other Web content. One specific form of tagging, known as geotagging, refers to tagging information on maps. For example, Google Maps allows users to add pictures and information, such as restaurant or www.downloadslide.net We b 2. 0 213 hotel ratings, to maps. Therefore, when users access Google Maps, their experience is enriched because they can see pictures of attractions, reviews, and things to do, posted by everyone, and all related to the map location they are viewing. Really Simple Syndication Really Simple Syndication (RSS) is a Web 2.0 feature that allows you to receive the informa­ tion you want (customized information), when you want it, without having to surf thousands of Web sites. RSS allows anyone to syndicate (publish) his or her blog, or any other content, to anyone who has an interest in subscribing to it. When changes to the content are made, subscribers receive a notification of the changes and an idea of what the new content contains. Subscribers can then click on a link that will take them to the full text of the new content. For example, CNN.com provides RSS feeds for each of its main topic areas, such as world news, sports news, technology news, and entertainment news. NBC uses RSS feeds to allow viewers to download the most current version of shows such as Meet the Press and NBC Nightly News. Figure 8.1 illustrates how to search an RSS and locate RSS feeds. To use RSS, you can utilize a special newsreader that displays RSS content feeds from the Web sites you select. Many such readers are available, several of them for free (see Feedspot; www.feedspot.com). In addition, most browsers have built-in RSS readers. For an excellent RSS tutorial, visit www.mnot.net/rss/tutorial. Blogs A weblog (blog for short) is a personal Web site, open to the public, in which the site creator expresses his or her feelings or opinions via a series of chronological entries. Bloggers—people who create and maintain blogs—write stories, convey news, and provide links to other articles FIGURE 8.1 The Web site of National Public Radio (NPR) with RSS toolbar aggregator and search function. www.downloadslide.net 214 CHAPT ER 8 Social Computing MIS and Web sites that are of interest to them. The simplest method of creating a blog is to sign up with a blogging service provider, such as www.blogger.com (now owned by Google), www. xanga.com, and www.sixapart.com. The blogosphere is the term for the millions of blogs on the Web. Many companies listen to consumers in the blogosphere who express their views on the companies’ products. Marketers refer to these views as consumer-generated media. For exam­ ple, Nielsen (www.nielsen-online.com) “mines” the blogosphere to provide information for its clients in several areas. Nielsen helps clients find ways to serve potential markets, ranging from broad-based to niche markets. The company also helps clients detect false rumors before these rumors appear in the mainstream media, and it gauges the potency of a marketing push or the popularity of a new product. Blogs often provide incredibly useful information, often before the information becomes available in traditional media outlets (e.g., television, newspapers). Although blogs can be very useful, they also have shortcomings. Perhaps the primary value of blogs is their ability to bring current, breaking news to the public in the fastest time possible. Unfortunately, in doing so, bloggers sometimes cut corners, and their blogs can be inaccurate. Regardless of their various problems, however, blogs have transformed the ways in which people gather and consume information. Microblogging MKT Microblogging is a form of blogging that allows users to write short messages (or capture an image or embedded video) and publish them. These messages can be submitted via text mes­ saging from mobile phones, instant messaging, e-mail, or simply over the Web. The content of a microblog differs from that of a blog because of the limited space per message (usually up to 140 characters). A popular microblogging service is Twitter. Twitter is a free microblogging service that allows its users to send messages and read other users’ messages and updates, known as tweets. Tweets are displayed on the user’s pro­ file page and delivered to other users who have signed up to receive them. Twitter is becoming a very useful business tool. It allows companies to quickly share infor­ mation with people interested in their products, thereby creating deeper relationships with their customers. Businesses also use Twitter to gather real-time market intelligence and cus­ tomer feedback. As an individual user, you can use Twitter to inform companies about your experiences with their business, offer product ideas, and learn about great offers. Microblogging is very popular in China, with Weibo (www.weibo.com) being the most pop­ ular microblogging service in that country. Weibo has over 200 million monthly active members. Wikis POM MKT A wiki is a Web site made up entirely of content posted by users. Wikis have an “edit” link on each page that allows any user to add, change, or delete material, thus fostering easy collaboration. Wikis take advantage of the combined input of many individuals. Consider Wikipedia (www.wikipedia.org), an online encyclopedia that is the largest existing wiki. Wikipedia con­ tains almost five million articles in English (as of mid-2015), which attract some 500 million views every day. Wikipedia relies on volunteer administrators who enforce a neutral point of view, and it encourages users to delete copy that displays a clear bias. Nevertheless, there are still major debates over the reliability of Wikipedia articles. Many educators will not allow stu­ dents to cite references from Wikipedia because Wikipedia content is of uncertain origin. More­ over, Wikipedia does not provide any quality assessment or fact checking by experts. Therefore, academics and other professionals have major concerns about the accuracy of user-provided content. Organizations use wikis in several ways. In project management, for example, wikis pro­ vide a central repository for capturing constantly updated product features and specifications, tracking issues, resolving problems, and maintaining project histories. In addition, wikis enable www.downloadslide.net We b 2. 0 215 companies to collaborate with customers, suppliers, and other business partners on projects. Wikis are also valuable in knowledge management. For example, companies use wikis to keep enterprisewide documents, such as guidelines and frequently asked questions, accurate and current. Social Networking Web Sites A social network is a social structure composed of individuals, groups, or organizations linked by values, visions, ideas, financial exchange, friendship, kinship, conflict, or trade. Social networking refers to activities performed using social software tools (e.g., blogging) or social networking features (e.g., media sharing). Social networking allows convenient connections to those of similar interest. A social network can be described as a map of all relevant links or connections among the network’s members. For each individual member that map is his or her social graph. Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook originally coined this term to refer to the social network of relation­ ships among Facebook users. The idea was that Facebook would take advantage of relation­ ships among individuals to offer a richer online experience. Social networks can also be used to determine the social capital of individual participants. Social capital refers to the number of connections a person has within and between social networks. Participants congregate on social networking Web sites where they can create their own profile page for free and on which they can write blogs and wikis; post pictures, videos, or music; share ideas; and link to other Web locations they find interesting. Social networkers chat using instant messaging and Twitter, and they tag posted content with their own key words, making content searchable and facilitating interactions and transactions. Social networkers converse, collaborate, and share opinions, experiences, knowledge, insights, and perceptions with one another. They also use these Web sites to find like-minded people online, either to pursue an interest or a goal or just to establish a sense of community among people who may never meet in the real world. Participants who post on social networking sites tend to reveal a great deal of personal information. As a result, if they are not careful, bad things can happen. Table 8.1 displays the variety of online social networking platforms. Social networking Web sites allow users to upload their content to the Web in the form of text, voice, images, and videos. These social networking sites produce a massive amount of information uploaded by their users. As you see in IT’s About Business 8.1, startup Banjo has developed software to integrate and analyze all this information. IT’s About Business 8.1 MIS Banjo Organizes the World’s Social Media We all encounter “noise” generated by social media. In this context, noise consists of the massive amounts of unstructured data gener­ ated from tweets, Facebook updates, images, and full motion video clips, uploaded to various social media Web sites. Within this noise, there are important signals that need to be noted, collected, and an­ alyzed. The problem is clear: How can we make sense of all the noise? Startup Banjo (http://ban.jo) has developed software that functions as an event-detection engine. The software organizes the world’s social signals by location, enabling an unprecedented level of understanding of events that occur anywhere in the world, in real time. As such, Banjo has developed an information-gathering and -disseminating system that works anywhere in the world. Banjo displays data from geolocated posts uploaded from mobile devices, through a user-friendly Web site. Banjo integrates uploads from more than a dozen social networks, including Twitter (www.twitter.com), Instagram (https://instagram.com), Vine (https://vine.co), Facebook (www.facebook.com), Russia’s VKontakte (https://vk.com), and China’s Weibo (www.weibo.com), among others. How Banjo Works. In 2011, Banjo released a consumer news app (called Banjo 1.0), which integrated various social media feeds. According to AppData (www.appdata.com), approximately 7.5 mil­ lion people downloaded the app. Banjo 1.0 still exists, but the com­ pany no longer actively supports it. The next generation of Banjo, Banjo 2.0, benefits from the fact that users of Banjo 1.0 signed up through a social network. Banjo can access the posts of its 7.5 million users but also those of all their approximately 1.2 billion friends on their social networks. Banjo 2.0 harnesses the power of its reach of 1.2 billion people and www.downloadslide.net 216 CHAPT ER 8 Social Computing their ability to capture images, videos, and text through their mo­ bile devices. Banjo maps a grid over the whole world, consisting of more than 35 billion squares, each about the size of a football field. Since 2011, Banjo has constantly monitored every square in real time, overlaying every mobile public post onto its grid. The software knows what the usual state is for each square: this square is in a wheat field; this square is in a war zone with smoke and fire; this square is in Disneyland, and so on. Every minute, Banjo’s software analyzes thousands of geo­ located mobile posts, examining data on linguistics and location, and classifying photos and videos. When the data indicate an ab­ normality from the baseline, such as unusual activity in a normally quiet area, Banjo alerts company staff, who investigate the alert and either ignore it or notify users. As Banjo’s software accumulates more data and can “learn,” staff need to intervene less often. Banjo’s analytics include not only the ability to identify loca­ tions and photos, but to “rewind” each social media network. (The rewind function means that users can see what happened before a particular event occurred, for example just before an earthquake.) Rather than users trying to make sense of their social media feeds via hashtags and keywords, they can have an integrated view of their feeds, from any location on earth. Users enter their location (plus any desired keywords), and the Banjo maps resizes to scale. All the relevant public posts for that location are shown as pins on the map, with links to text, photos, and video. This process occurs in real time. Traditionally, users have asked, “How do we mine social me­ dia?” Banjo integrates social media from the perspective of mobile phones, which are in specific locations in the real world. As a result, Banjo asks, “How can we know what is going on in a specific place at a specific time?” Naturally, such a treasure trove of data could be a privacy minefield. Banjo has tried to protect users’ data by developing a patented method of automatically searching its database and re­ moving any posts that have been made private or deleted by users. When users change their privacy settings, Banjo deletes all infor­ mation retroactively. The information is no longer in Banjo’s sys­ tem and no longer in Banjo’s users’ systems, immediately. Banjo Applications. Banjo’s technology has implications for diverse industries, including news and media, financial services, marketing, insurance, public health, and many others. Banjo isn’t just a way to locate an impromptu street party— it can also save lives. It was credited with alerting authorities to a shooting on a Florida campus, thanks to a tweet sent by one of the witnesses. Just after 12:30 AM on November 20, 2014, a single tweet was sent from a location near the Florida State University (FSU; www.fsu.edu) campus in Tallahassee. The tweet contained no hashtag, but Banjo picked up on the words “scared to death,” and noted an increase in the number of Twitter and Instagram posts coming from that location. The software noted the deviation in that grid square and alerted Banjo employees, who notified the local CBS affiliate in Tallahassee. That channel investigated and was the first on the scene to report the wounding of three people in a shooting in an FSU library. Media companies, including NBC and ESPN, are among Banjo’s longest customers. Here are more applications of Banjo by media outlets. Sinclair Broadcasting Group (www.sbgi.net), which owns 162 television sta­ tions in 79 markets, uses Banjo as a sort of remote reporting team. Banjo alerts its newsrooms to a breaking story. A news director can travel virtually to the scene, following a real-time stream of all the posts of photos, videos, and commentary from users at that loca­ tion. The newsroom can then contact the authors of those posts without needing to tweet or email, and get permission to use their content on air, without having to send a reporter to the scene. Sin­ clair can use Banjo to create a timeline of events leading up a cer­ tain activity, such as an album of images and videos that happened just before the Charlie Hebdo attacks in Paris in January 2015. The technology allows Sinclair to syndicate its newscasts to licensees in a cost-effective manner. Banjo technology is also disrupting the business world. In No­ vember 2014, Banjo analyzed images of a fire at a diesel pipeline in Saudi Arabia. Its photo classification algorithms flagged the inci­ dent. Customers working in the finance field used the information when trading on oil in under an hour after the photos were flagged. Two hours after the initial Banjo alert, by the time the media picked up on the story, the price of oil futures rose by $2 a barrel. Clearly, traders could make huge amounts of money with the lead times provided by Banjo alerts. Banjo is quick to point out that its goal is not to gather all the personal information about users and sell it to advertisers. Instead, it generates and sells intelligence from the content that users will­ ingly provide. In 2014, Banjo Enterprise generated revenue of less than $1 million. However, the company generated the entire amount through word of mouth, with no marketing effort and no sales team. Social media is not the be-all and end-all source of informa­ tion; it doesn’t provide all the data needed for Banjo’s intelligence gathering. Therefore, the startup is adding new data sources, such as weather data from various countries, including the National Weather Service (which has approached Banjo about constructing an alert system) as well as satellite imagery. Further, Banjo notes that in an Internet of Things environment, sensors in physical objects such as vehicles and buildings could also emit data worth collecting. Sources: Compiled from J. Paduda, “Will Banjo Be the Social Media App that Revolutionizes Insurance?” joepaduda.com, June 3, 2015; D. MacMillan, “Banjo Raises $100 Million to Detect World Events in Real Time,” Wall Street Journal Digits, May 6, 2015; A. Talbert, “How a Social Media Company You’ve Never Heard Of Is Primed to Revolutionize Customer Service,” Zoho Blogs, April 27, 2015; W. Schmidt, “What Would You Do If You Had a Crystal Ball?” Tech.co, April 22, 2015; H. Clancy, “Why Social Media Startup Banjo Will Strike a Chord with Marketers,” Fortune, April 2, 2015; W. Bourne, “The Most Important Social Media Company You’ve Never Heard Of,” Inc, April, 2015; O. Williams, “Banjo Updates Mobile Apps to Create TiVO for Social Media,” TheNextWeb, March 8, 2014; D. Etherington, “Banjo Puts News and Live Events Front and Center with Version 4.0 of Its Mobile App,” TechCrunch, January 16, 2014; M. Butcher, “New Banjo App Aims to Become a True Browser for Location, A Much Bigger Opportunity,” TechCrunch, November 15, 2012; T. Geron, “Banjo App Connects with the Nearby Social World,” Forbes, June 22, 2011; http://ban.jo, accessed August 15, 2015. Questions 1. What are potential disadvantages of Banjo? (Hint: What about privacy concerns?) 2. How would marketing managers use Banjo? Provide an example to support your answer. 3. How would insurance companies use Banjo? Provide an ex­ ample to support your answer. www.downloadslide.net We b 2. 0 TA B LE 8 .1 Categories of Social Networking Web Sites Socially oriented: Socially focused public sites, open to anyone: • Facebook (www.facebook.com) • Google+ (https://plus.google.com) • Hi5 (www.hi5.com) Professional networking: Focused on networking for business professionals: • LinkedIn (www.linkedin.com) Media sharing: • Netcasting includes podcasting (audio) and videocasting (audio and video). For example, educa­ tional institutions use netcasts to provide students with access to lectures, lab demonstrations, and sports events. In 2007, Apple launched iTunes U, which offers free content provided by major U.S. universities such as Stanford and MIT. • Web 2.0 media sites allow people to come together and share user-generated digital media, such as pictures, audio, and video: ° Video (Amazon Video on Demand, YouTube, Hulu, Facebook) ° Music (Amazon MP3, Last.fm, Rhapsody, Pandora, Facebook, iTunes) ° Photographs (Photobucket, Flickr, Shutterfly, Picasa, Facebook) Communication: • Blogs: Blogger, LiveJournal, TypePad, WordPress, Vox, Xanga • Microblogging/Presence applications: Twitter, Tumblr, Yammer Collaboration: Wikis (Wikimedia, PBworks, Wetpaint) Social bookmarking (or social tagging): Focused on helping users store, organize, search, and manage bookmarks of Web pages on the Internet: • Delicious (www.delicious.com) • StumbleUpon (www.stumbleupon.com) • Google Reader (http://reader.google.com) • CiteULike (www.citeulike.com) Social news: Focused on user-posted news stories that are ranked by popularity based on user voting: • Digg (www.digg.com) • Chime.in (http://chime.in) • Reddit (www.reddit.com) Events: Focused on alerts for relevant events, people you know nearby, etc.: • Eventful (www.eventful.com) • Meetup (www.meetup.com) • Foursquare (www.foursquare.com) Virtual meeting place: Sites that are essentially three-dimensional worlds, built and owned by the residents (the users): • Second Life (www.secondlife.com) Discovery: • Foursquare (http://foursquare.com) helps its members discover and share information about busi­ nesses and attractions around them. Online marketplaces for microjobs: For example, TaskRabbit (www.taskrabbit.com) and Zaarly (www.zaarly.com) enable people to farm out chores to a growing number of temporary personal assistants. Thousands of unemployed and underemployed workers use these sites. The part-time or full-time tasks are especially popular with stay-at-home moms, retirees, and students. Workers choose their jobs and negotiate their rates. 217 www.downloadslide.net 218 CHAPT ER 8 Social Computing Enterprise Social Networks MIS Business-oriented social networks can be public, such as LinkedIn.com. As such, they are owned and managed by an independent company. However, an increasing number of companies have created in-house, private social net­ works for their employees, former employees, business partners, and/or customers. Such net­ works are “behind the firewall” and are often referred to as corporate social networks. Employees utilize these networks to create connections that allow them to establish virtual teams, bring new employees up to speed, improve collaboration, and increase employee retention by creat­ ing a sense of community. Employees are able to interact with their coworkers on a level that is typically absent in large organizations or in situations where people work remotely. Corporate social networks are used for many processes, including: • Networking and community building, both inside and outside an organization • Social collaboration: Collaborative work and problem solving using wikis, blogs, instant messaging, collaborative office, and other special-purpose Web-based collaboration plat­ forms; for example, see Laboranova (www.laboranova.com) • Social publishing: Employees and others creating, either individually or collaboratively, and posting contents—photos, videos, presentation slides, and documents—into a member’s or a community’s accessible-content repository such as YouTube, Flickr, SlideShare, and DocStoc • Social views and feedback • Social intelligence and social analytics: Monitoring, analyzing, and interpreting conver­ sations, interactions, and associations among people, topics, and ideas to gain insights. Social intelligence is useful for examining relationships and work patterns of individuals and groups and for discovering people and expertise. Mashups A mashup is a Web site that takes different content from a number of other Web sites and mixes them together to create a new kind of content. The launch of Google Maps is credited with pro­ viding the start for mashups. A user can take a map from Google, add his or her data, and then display a map mashup on his or her Web site that plots crime scenes, cars for sale, or anything else (see Figure 8.2). There are many examples of mashups (for a complete list of mashups, see www.programmableweb.com): • Craigslist developed a dynamic map of all available apartments in the United States that are listed on their Web site (www.housingmaps.com). FIGURE 8.2 GoogleMaps (www .googlemaps.com) is a classic example of a mashup. In this case, GoogleMaps is pulling in informa­ tion from public transportation Web sites to provide the customer with transit directions.