Module 1: Technology & Modern Enterprise
Chapter 1
The rise of social media makes the service and ethics bar for todays managers even higher. Since
everything is recorded on the Internet, it became highly important to respond quickly to bad publicity.
Social media acts as a catalyst for global change, playing a key role in organizing uprisings worldwide.
Fast and cheap computing is helping to create the “INTERNET OF THINGS”. It is a vision where low-cost
senators, processors and communication embedded into a wide array of products and our environment,
allowing a vast network to collect data, analyze input and coordinate collective action.
New technologies turn sophisticating computing into a utility available to even smallest businesses and
nonprofits. They have lowered costs and fueled data-driven decision-making, but they have also raised
privacy and security concerns, especially through “Big Data”.
Technology jobs become very important and technological know-how is often the skills that assures you
better job opportunities. There is no managerial discipline anymore that is not being impacted by
technology.
Chapter 9
Web 2.0 – Internet services that foster collaboration and information sharing.
Social media efforts are technologies that support creation of user-generated content, and includes blogs,
wikis, photo, and video sharing sites. Peer production means that users work collaboratively to create
content, products, and services. The concept of sharing economy (collaborative consumption) is related
to peer production. It means when participants share access to products and services rather than having
ownership. Shared resources can be owned by a central service provider or provided by a community that
pools available resources.
Blogs
It is an online journal entry, usually made in reverse chronological order. They provide comment
mechanism where people can post their feedbacks. By blogging, the organizations ideas are distributed
immediately in an unfiltered way. Corporate blogs can be published directly, skipping mainstream media.
Most mainstream news outlets supplement their content with blogs that offer greater depth, more detail,
and immediacy for breaking news.
- First, blog comments can create a lot of spam.
- Employee blogging can be difficult to control and public postings can live forever.
A long tail phenomenon – when firms make money by offering near-limitless selection.
The reputation of widely read blogs is reinforced by trackbacks (links in a blog post that refer readers to
cited sources).
Blog rolls – a list of a bloggers favorite blogs
, Some other definitions:
- Owned media: communication channels that an organization control.
- Paid media: efforts where an organization pays to leverage a channel or promote a message. Paid
media efforts include advertisements and sponsorships.
- Earned media: promotions that are not paid for or owned but rather grow organically from
customer efforts or other favorable publicity. Examples are word of mouth.
- Inbound marketing: leveraging online channels to draw customers to the firm with compelling
content rather than conventional form of promotion such as e-mail, sales calls, etc.
- Search Engine Optimization (SEO): the process of improving a page’s organic page rankings.
WİKİS
It is a website that can be modified by anyone, directly within a web browser. The largest and the most
popular wiki is Wikipedia. Wikis support “what you see is what you get”, which describes graphical editing
tools. Wikis also provide a version history, which allows the community to roll back a wiki to a prior state.
This is useful to restore earlier work in the event of an error. Wikis are available both as software as well
as online services where software and content are housed “in the cloud” by third parties that run the
technology for wiki users. The unstructured nature of wikis is a strength and a weakness.
Wikimasters are individuals often employed by organizations to review community content in order to
delete excessive posts. The larger and more active a wiki community is, the more likely it is that content
will be up to date and that errors will be quickly corrected. Griefers (internet vandals) regularly alter pages
but since the community is large enough, it is realized in an early phase. Wikipedia’s norms dictate that
all the articles must be written in “neutral point of view” format, free of bias and opinion. Wikis can make
workers more productive and informed; it can kill corporate timewasters.
Social Networks
It is an online community allowing users to establish a personal profile and communicate with others.
Social networks are a hothouse for earned media, where enthusiastic consumers can help spreading the
word about products. Feeds are inherently viral, can rapidly initiate activism and mobile populations.
Corporate use of social media – social networks have become organizational productivity tools. Social
network listings are easy to update and expand. Maintaining social networks is particularly important for
industries like IT and health care. It is also important when employees are working remotely or client
locations. As a dialogue catalyst, a social network transforms the public directory into a font of knowledge
sharing that promotes organization flattening and value-added expertise sharing.
Twitter and Rise of Microblogging
Twitter is a microblogging service that allows user to post 140-character messages. Twitter is emerging as
a business tool, since it is found to be useful for real-time promotions, time-sensitive information,
scheduling and yield management, customer engagement. It is also useful for support, promotion,
intelligence gathering, idea sourcing and as a sales channel.
Organic reach and advertising
Facebook posts are curated by the firm’s algorithms, firms are reaching fewer of their fans.