ASSEMENT ON IMPACTS OF SOCIAL MEDIA TO AN ORGANISATION

BY KIDENDEI SEGERETI S.
In the era of Face book and YouTube, brand building has become a vexing challenge. This is not how things were supposed to turn out. A decade ago most companies were heralding the arrival of a new golden age of branding. They hired creative agencies and armies of technologists to insert brands throughout the digital universe. Viral, buzz, memes, stickiness, and form factor became the lingua franca of branding. But despite all the hoopla, such efforts have had very little payoff.

As a central feature of their digital strategy, companies made huge bets on what is often called branded content. The thinking went like this: Social media would allow your company to leapfrog traditional media and forge relationships directly with customers. If you told them great stories and connected with them in real time, your brand would become a hub for a community of consumers. Businesses have invested billions pursuing this vision. Yet few brands have generated meaningful consumer interest online. In fact, social media seems to have made brands less significant.

Branding is a set of techniques designed to generate cultural relevance. Digital technologies have not only created potent new social networks but also dramatically altered how culture works. 

Digital crowds now serve as very effective and prolific innovators of culture a phenomenon is called crowd culture. Crowd culture changes the rules of branding which techniques work and which do not.

While promoters insist that branded content is a hot new thing, it’s actually a relic of the mass media age that has been repackaged as a digital concept. 

In the early days of that era, companies borrowed approaches from popular entertainment to make their brands famous, using short-form storytelling, cinematic tricks, songs, and empathetic characters to win over audiences this early form of branded content worked well because the entertainment media were oligopolies, so cultural competition was limited.

 In the United States, three networks produced television programming for 30 weeks or so every year and then went into reruns. Films were distributed only through local movie theaters; similarly, magazine competition was restricted to what fit on the shelves at drugstores. Consumer marketing companies could buy their way to fame by paying to place their brands in this tightly controlled cultural arena.

Once audiences could opt out of ads, it became harder for brands to buy fame.

Brands also infiltrated culture by sponsoring TV shows and events, attaching themselves to successful content. Since fans had limited access to their favorite entertainers, brands could act as intermediaries.

 For decades, we were accustomed to fast food chains’ sponsoring new blockbuster films, luxury autos’ bringing us golf and tennis competitions, and youth brands’ underwriting bands and festivals.

The rise of new technologies that allowed audiences to opt out of ads from cable networks to DVRs and then the internet—made it much harder for brands to buy fame. Now they had to compete directly with real entertainment. So companies upped the ante.

New media

New media
New media most commonly refers to content available on-demand through the Internet , accessible on any digital device, usually containing interactive user feedback and creative participation. Common examples of new media include websites such as
online newspapers , blogs , or wikis ,
video games , and social media. A defining characteristic of new media is dialogue. New Media transmit content through connection and conversation. It enables people around the world to share, comment on, and discuss a wide variety of topics. Unlike any of past technologies, New Media is grounded on an interactive community. [1]
Most technologies described as "new media" are digital, often having characteristics of being manipulated, networkable, dense , compressible , and interactive . [2] Some examples may be the Internet , websites, computer multimedia, video games ,
augmented reality , CD-ROMS, and DVDs. New media are often contrasted to "old media," such as television, radio, and print media, although scholars in communication and media studies have criticised rigid distinctions based on oldness and novelty. New media does not include
television programs (only analog broadcast), feature films, magazines ,
books, or paper-based publications – unless they contain technologies that enable digital interactivity. [3]
Wikipedia , an online encyclopedia, is an example, combining Internet accessible digital text, images and video with web-links, creative participation of contributors, interactive feedback of users and formation of a participant community of editors and donors for the benefit of non-community readers. Facebook is an example of the social media model, in which most users are also participants. Wikitude is an example for augmented reality. It displays information about the users' surroundings in a mobile camera view, including image recognition, 3D modeling and location-based approach to augmented reality.
History
In the 1950s, connections between computing and radical art began to grow stronger. It was not until the 1980s that Alan Kay and his co-workers at Xerox PARC began to give the computability of a personal computer to the individual, rather than have a big organization be in charge of this. "In the late 1980s and early 1990s, however, we seem to witness a different kind of parallel relationship between social changes and computer design . Although causally unrelated, conceptually it makes sense that the
Cold War and the design of the Web took place at exactly the same time." [3]
Writers and philosophers such as
Marshall McLuhan were instrumental in the development of media theory during this period. His now famous declaration in Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (1964) that " the medium is the message" drew attention to the too often ignored influence media and technology themselves, rather than their "content," have on humans' experience of the world and on society broadly.
Until the 1980s media relied primarily upon print and analog broadcast models, such as those of television and radio . The last twenty-five years have seen the rapid transformation into media which are predicated upon the use of digital technologies, such as the Internet and video games . However, these examples are only a small representation of new media. The use of digital computers has transformed the remaining 'old' media, as suggested by the advent of digital television and online publications . Even traditional media forms such as the printing press have been transformed through the application of technologies such as image manipulation software like Adobe Photoshop and desktop publishing
BY PROTAS LEVINA BAPRM 42657

Extranet

An extranet is a website that allows controlled access to partners, vendors and suppliers or an authorized set of customers – normally to a subset of the information accessible from an organization's intranet . An extranet is similar to a DMZ in that it provides access to needed services for authorised parties, without granting access to an organization's entire network.

Historically the term was occasionally also used in the sense of two organisations sharing their internal networks over a VPN .[1]
Enterprise applications
During the late 1990s and early 2000s, several industries started to use the term 'extranet' to describe centralized repositories of shared data (and supporting applications) made accessible via the web only to authorized members of particular work groups - for example, geographically dispersed, multi-company project teams. Some applications are offered on a software as a service (SaaS) basis.

For example, in the construction industry, project teams may access a project extranet to share drawings, photographs and documents, and use online applications to mark-up and make comments and to manage and report on project-related communications. In 2003 in the United Kingdom , several of the leading vendors formed the Network for
Construction Collaboration Technology Providers (NCCTP) to promote the technologies and to establish data exchange standards between the different data systems. The same type of construction-focused technologies have also been developed in the
United States, Australia and mainland Europe. [2]

Advantages

Exchange large volumes of data using Electronic Data Interchange (EDI)
Share product catalogs exclusively with trade partners
Collaborate with other companies on joint development efforts
Jointly develop and use training programs with other companies
Provide or access services provided by one company to a group of other companies, such as an online banking application managed by one company on behalf of affiliated bank

Disadvantages

Extranets can be expensive to implement and maintain within an organization (e.g., hardware, software, employee training costs), if hosted internally rather than by an application service provider .
Security of extranets can be a concern when hosting valuable or proprietary information.

BY PROTAS LEVINA   BAPRM 42657

Challenges in Oline  communication
By Kidendei Segereti S
Nonverbal cues

When e-mail first was introduced, people thought it was impossible to have other interactions than the exchange of short task-oriented messages. Remarkably, the same opinion existed when the telephone was first introduced. The lack of nonverbal cues implies automatically that not all information is fully transferred. The messages typically conveyed by these cues are absent in a text-based environment, which implies that for the interpretation of messages online we have to rely exclusively on verbal information. This may have consequences for the decoding of others’ emotions because we cannot make use of nonverbal cues in the interpretation of incoming messages. In addition, the lack of nonverbal cues also has consequences for the expression of our own emotions since every emotion has to be verbalized and part of the nonverbal expression happens unconsciously. The strictly task-oriented messages should not suffer that much from these consequences. But even in a work setting many messages contain both social and task-oriented components, and are ambiguous in a sense. One of the functions of nonverbal cues in F2F communication is that the ambiguity of a message is reduced. The same verbal messages can portray different signals depending on tone, emphasis, and emotional expression.

Egocentrism as a source of Miscommunication

The fact that the “how things are said part” is missing in regular e-mail communication, is not without consequences. In fact, this is likely to be a fertile ground for miscommunication and in particular not noticing that miscommunication. Humor and sarcasm, for example, is difficult to properly communicate by e-mail. The misunderstanding is usually that the sender thinks (s)he has sent a clear message, and the receiver does not interpret the message in the way the sender intended it. This can lead to awkward situations. Miscommunication can be a source of stress because an employee has to take action to correct the message which automatically implies that extra time and attention is needed to handle the message again. Additionally, an employee needs to engage in damage control in maintaining a good relationship with the “victim” of the miscommunication since the main part of e-mail communication is devoted to long-term relations (colleagues, customers). There are indications that egocentrism is an important source in miscommunication.

Feedback

Another type of ambiguous communication in a task-oriented setting is the exchange of feedback messages. Since e-mail is proven to be very practical in the exchange of documents it has also become more common to deliver feedback on these documents by e-mail. Feedback messages can be considered ambiguous because they have an objective, critical component, but also a motivational component in the form of constructive feedback. In organizations, feedback is considered as a first step to improvement and personal development. This makes it an important resource fuelling our motivation at work. However, if information is likely to be negative, media choice can be crucial in delivering the feedback. In our western society it is not done to send negative personal feedback by e-mail.

WAYS SOCIAL MEDIA CHANGE

It is hard to know sometimes how our life has changed until we stop for a moment and look at how different it is from ten or even five years ago. In recent years social media, likely more than anything else, has significantly impacted most of our daily lives. Envisioning the global conversation that has developed over the past few years because of tools like Facebook and Twitter might have been unimaginable for most people at the beginning of this decade.

But social media communication tools have profoundly changed our lives and how we interact with one another and the world around us. Here are the top areas that social media has affected in our daily lives.

1. Where We Get Our News

If you're like me, each morning before checking Yahoo! or Google News or an online newspaper site like USA Today or CNN, you first look at the stories your friends and people that you follow are sharing via Twitter or Facebook. After all, you didn't choose the editors at newspapers and other publications, but you did choose the people and groups that you follow on Twitter, Facebook, or other social networks.

Friends on social media are increasingly becoming people’s trusted sources of information, even more than search engines. Tech blogger Mark Cuban recently noted, "For the 1st time ever, more people are finding my blog from Twitter and Facebook referrals than via Google.”

Of course, many people still use RSS feeds to stay up-to-date on blogs and publications of interest, but our list of sources for what is worthy of our attention has expanded significantly. Furthermore, by getting our news from social media, we know who is recommending it, and can easily communicate with that person about it. News is more social than ever.

2. How We Start and Do Business

It is easier than ever to start and launch a business today, in great part thanks to social media. We can not only locate potential collaborators and employees through interest-focused Facebook groups, Twitter searches, and niche social networks, but perhaps more importantly, social media gives people who have time, but little money for advertising, the chance to engage with others and promote their business. A recent article in the New York Times concluded, "For many mom-and-pop shops with no ad budget, Twitter has become their sole means of marketing."

While business in the past was generally conducted with those in one’s immediate environment, social media, including everything from blogging to tweeting to posting videos on YouTube, has opened new possibilities for both customers and clients. Who we do business with and how we promote that business has moved increasingly online, and for small business especially, social media has proved valuable.

3. How We Meet and Stay in Touch with People

People certainly still meet others at social venues like clubs and parties, but it is easier than ever to discover people who share our interests through social media, whether that means via groups on Facebook or following people on Twitter. Even if your interests lie in an obscure area, like 15th century poetry in France or Nepalese art, there is probably a Facebook group about it, and a Twitter search will likely turn up other people talking about the same subject.

Of course, there is only so much communication that can happen through a social network, but via Tweetups and other in-person events, people are expanding these online interactions to face-to-face meetings. The introductions are initially made through social networks, then people develop the relationship using phone calls and in-person meetings.

Studies reveal that our time on social networks has nearly tripled in the last year, and while Facebook has always primarily centered around connecting with people and staying in touch with friends, according to a study on eMarketer, “41.6% percent of Internet users who used Twitter did so to keep in touch with their friends.”

In other words, social media is increasingly being used to find and maintain both old and potentially new friendships.

4. What We Reveal

The old paradigm in communication was that people generally revealed very little of their fears and doubts. They tried to present the image of themselves to other people as completely confident and knowledgeable. The goal was to make sure that you appeared like you were always in complete control. But this is shifting, in part, because of social media. The paradigm is now no longer to try to appear perfect, but to be more transparent with your thoughts and feelings, to reveal your humanness.

We now have queens acknowledging that they get nervous at times when speaking, CEOs being more honest and at times using blogs to express reservations over past decisions, and people openly sharing personal views on social issues. Of course, what we decide to reveal and when to reveal it can be delicate, and there will always likely be items we wish to keep private. However, rather than working to hide our thoughts and feelings, social media is helping to create greater personal transparency.

5. What We Can Influence

It used to be a big deal that Oprah had over 20 million people watch her show every week or that the New York Times was read by millions of people, and while these large media outlets still control much of our attention, now with social media, power is increasingly more widespread. So-called mainstream media is no longer always the driving influencer of public opinion.

On Twitter, some individuals now have a million or more followers, Facebook Pages can also have hundreds of thousands of fans, and YouTube videos can get millions of views when they go viral. Most of this content is coming from regular people, rather than big, corporate-owned media organizations. For example, people like occasional Mashable guest writer Brandon Mendelson, who has over 950,000 followers on Twitter, have used social media to increase their influence beyond what was possible for "regular people" in the past.

Even if we have few followers on Twitter or friends on Facebook or subscribers to our blog, the average person’s influence is increasing as communication channels become more open and fluid. As the networks for sharing and amplifying information strengthen, the ability of each person to influence public opinion and policies increases. As a result, we feel much less like passive bystanders and much more like participants who have a voice in the events in our world.
BY PROTAS LEVINA   BAPRM 42657

Challenges in internet communication
kidendei Segereti

Nonverbal cues

When e-mail first was introduced, people thought it was impossible to have other interactions than the exchange of short task-oriented messages. Remarkably, the same opinion existed when the telephone was first introduced. The lack of nonverbal cues implies automatically that not all information is fully transferred. The messages typically conveyed by these cues are absent in a text-based environment, which implies that for the interpretation of messages online we have to rely exclusively on verbal information. This may have consequences for the decoding of others’ emotions because we cannot make use of nonverbal cues in the interpretation of incoming messages. In addition, the lack of nonverbal cues also has consequences for the expression of our own emotions since every emotion has to be verbalized and part of the nonverbal expression happens unconsciously. The strictly task-oriented messages should not suffer that much from these consequences. But even in a work setting many messages contain both social and task-oriented components, and are ambiguous in a sense. One of the functions of nonverbal cues in F2F communication is that the ambiguity of a message is reduced. The same verbal messages can portray different signals depending on tone, emphasis, and emotional expression.

Egocentrism as a source of Miscommunication

The fact that the “how things are said part” is missing in regular e-mail communication, is not without consequences. In fact, this is likely to be a fertile ground for miscommunication and in particular not noticing that miscommunication. Humor and sarcasm, for example, is difficult to properly communicate by e-mail. The misunderstanding is usually that the sender thinks (s)he has sent a clear message, and the receiver does not interpret the message in the way the sender intended it. This can lead to awkward situations. Miscommunication can be a source of stress because an employee has to take action to correct the message which automatically implies that extra time and attention is needed to handle the message again. Additionally, an employee needs to engage in damage control in maintaining a good relationship with the “victim” of the miscommunication since the main part of e-mail communication is devoted to long-term relations (colleagues, customers). There are indications that egocentrism is an important source in miscommunication.

Feedback

Another type of ambiguous communication in a task-oriented setting is the exchange of feedback messages. Since e-mail is proven to be very practical in the exchange of documents it has also become more common to deliver feedback on these documents by e-mail. Feedback messages can be considered ambiguous because they have an objective, critical component, but also a motivational component in the form of constructive feedback. In organizations, feedback is considered as a first step to improvement and personal development. This makes it an important resource fuelling our motivation at work. However, if information is likely to be negative, media choice can be crucial in delivering the feedback. In our western society it is not done to send negative personal feedback by e-mail. 

EFFECTIVE CORPORATE COMMUNICATION

Communication is about more than just exchanging information. It's about understanding the emotion and intentions behind the information. Effective communication is also a two-way street. It’s not only how you convey a message so that it is received and understood by someone in exactly the way you intended, it’s also how you listen to gain the full meaning of what’s being said and to make the other person feel heard and understood.

More than just the words you use, effective communication combines a set of skills including nonverbal communication, engaged listening, managing stress in the moment, the ability to communicate assertively, and the capacity to recognize and understand your own emotions and those of the person you’re communicating with.

Effective communication is the glue that helps you deepen your connections to others and improve teamwork, decision making, and problem solving. It enables you to communicate even negative or difficult messages without creating conflict or destroying trust.

While effective communication is a learned skill, it is more effective when it’s spontaneous rather than formulaic. A speech that is read, for example, rarely has the same impact as a speech that’s delivered (or appears to be delivered) spontaneously. Of course, it takes time and effort to develop these skills and become an effective communicator. The more effort and practice you put in, the more instinctive and spontaneous your communication skills will become.

Barriers to effective interpersonal communication

Stress and out-of-control emotion. 

When you’re stressed or emotionally overwhelmed, you’re more likely to misread other people, send confusing or off-putting nonverbal signals, and lapse into unhealthy knee-jerk patterns of behavior. Take a moment to calm down before continuing a conversation.

Lack of focus.

You can’t communicate effectively when you’re multitasking. If you’re planning what you’re going to say next, daydreaming, checking text messages, or thinking about something else, you’re almost certain to miss nonverbal cues in the conversation. You need to stay focused on the moment-to-moment experience.

Inconsistent body language. 

Nonverbal communication should reinforce what is being said, not contradict it. If you say one thing, but your body language says something else, your listener will likely feel you’re being dishonest. For example, you can’t say “yes” while shaking your head no.

Negative body language.

If you disagree with or dislike what’s being said, you may use negative body language to rebuff the other person’s message, such as crossing your arms, avoiding eye contact, or tapping your feet. You don’t have to agree, or even like what’s being said, but to communicate effectively without making the other person defensive, it’s important to avoid sending negative signals.

BY PROTAS LEVINA 

BAPRM 42657