APA
(American Psychological Assoc.)
References
Gosling, S. D., Augustine, A. A., Vazire, S., Holtzman, N., & Gaddis, S. (2011).
Manifestations of personality in Online Social Networks: self-reported
Facebook-related behaviors and observable profile information.
Cyberpsychology, Behavior And Social Networking, 14(9), 483-488.
doi:10.1089/cyber.2010.0087
APA
(American Psychological Assoc.)
References
Ruder, T. D., Hatch, G. M., Ampanozi, G., Thali, M. J., & Fischer, N. (2011).
Suicide announcement on Facebook. Crisis: The Journal Of Crisis
Intervention And Suicide Prevention, 32(5), 280-282. doi:10.1027/02275910/a000086
7.3 Social and Business Networking
T
hink for a moment about the people in your life. They typically fall into two main groups,
or networks. The first are your friends and family, with whom you share your innermost secrets,
dreams, desires, and aspirations. The second group of people you associate with is your
colleagues and associates at work. Of course, many of them might become friends too, but in
general, you share different aspects of your life with them as compared with your family. These
are the two main networks that define our daily interactions.
With the advent of Web 2.0, we now have Web applications that enable us to communicate with
these networks in new and exciting ways. For your friends and family, there is the social
networking site called Facebook, and for your colleagues at work, LinkedIn® has become the most
important business networking site.
These networks are extremely popular Web destinations, and they are examples of Web 2.0
technology at its best. Taking a look at the popularity statistics, it is staggering to see the amount
of traffic they receive. According to statistics from Facebook, there are over one billion monthly
active users. (http://newsroom.fb.com/Key-Facts). By comparison, LinkedIn® had 175 million
members in August 2012 (see: http://press.LinkedIn.com/about). In this section, we will look more
closely at these applications and explore how you can use them to cultivate, expand, and improve
your communication with the people in your life.
Facebook
If you have not experienced Facebook personally, it can be difficult to understand. Using
Facebook is not like transforming a paper diary into digitized text and putting it on the Web, as
a blog does. Instead, it is an entirely new communications environment. It was Friendster and
MySpace that originally defined this genre of Web applications. Friendster no longer exists, and
Facebook has now trampled MySpace to become the leading social networking site.
So, what is Facebook, exactly? Facebook (which can be found at http://www.facebook.com)
originated in 2004. This Web application allows you to blog, establish private networks, share
photos, and locate friends. You can form and join groups of people who share your interests. You
can post brief status updates, as you might do on Twitter. Facebook is a dynamic and vibrant
Web community that is completely free to use (Vander Veer, 2008).
Friends on Facebook
Without friends, Facebook is a lonely and quiet place. So, the first thing you will want to do is try
to find people you know by using the search box in the upper-right corner of your monitor screen.
When you see someone you know, as add them as a Facebook Friend if you want to share
information. Once they accept the invitation, you can start keeping track of what they are doing
when they update their status, post a picture, or join a group. Both parties must agree before the
friendship is official. Once it is, then you have access to each other’s profiles, friend lists, postings,
and so on. There is now a new official word in the English language—the verb unfriend. This is
what you do when you decide to remove someone from your online Friends list.
Facebook’s Timeline and News Feed
When you finish creating your profile, you will have your own timeline. A timeline on Facebook
is like a big chronology of your life where your posts, photos, and likes will appear daily as you
create them. You can also insert historical posts in the past to commemorate memorable moments
like school graduations, marriages, and births of children. It is through this feature that people
can now post to dates before Facebook was
established. At the top, is a box with a question that asks things like: “What’s on your mind?”
“How’s it going?” or “How are you doing?” Your answer to this question is called your Facebook
status update. When you type something and select the Post button, it is posted to your timeline
as well as to the timelines of all of your friends. You can also visit one of your friends and post
something directly to them on their timeline, and, of course, they can do the same for you. There
are also options for real-time chat and private messages.
The News Feed is a scrolling list of all of your friends’ posts on Facebook as they happen.
Facebook considers Timeline and News Feed the two central “pillars” of its site, and in 2013, they
are emphasizing a third called “Graph Search.”
Facebook’s Activity Log and Graph Search
Another key component of your Facebook page is known as the Activity Log. This is a list of all
of your posts and various activities you have made from the very moment you first created an
account on Facebook. This includes photos you have been tagged in, friends you have made, and
pages and posts you have liked.
As of September 2012, Facebook updated the Activity Log to include search queries. Search is
becoming more important to the Facebook mission. Its search engine is called Graph Search. This
is a powerful new tool that will enable users to find friends who have visited a particular place
or like a specific topic. Examples of these searches might be: “Chinese restaurants liked by my
friends who are Chinese.” While this is a great feature for finding new types of information, it
does raise continued privacy concerns.
Facebook Caution
It is important to remember that everything you do on Facebook is visible to all of your friends.
So, remember who is watching. Dave Awl, author of a book titled Facebook Me!, offered an
excellent piece of advice. He suggested, “An ounce of discretion is worth a ton of privacy settings”
(Awl, 2009, p. 52). Keep in mind that family members, friends, and coworkers might all be in your
Facebook network. If they are, then you should remember to be discreet. Do not complain about
your coworkers to your friends or disclose family secrets to your coworkers. Bad behavior on
Facebook can have real-world consequences. For example, there have been cases of colleges
rejecting a student’s application based on inappropriate postings on Facebook. Although there
are some privacy settings, as a general rule, it is good to remember that if you post something on
Facebook, there are no secrets. Once you become more advanced with Facebook, you can group
your friends into tiers such as Trusted, Family, Acquaintance, and Restricted friends. Then you
can begin controlling who sees what. But until then, post wisely and discreetly, but most of all,
have fun!
Google+™
Despite its size and market share, Facebook does have competitors. Its largest threat is from
Google, who has also entered the social networking competition with Google+™
(http://plus.google.com). While in many ways it is similar to Facebook, a major difference
is that Google+™ members have an increased chance of interacting with strangers, even those in a
different country.
A key feature in Google+™ is its circles. This is a simple way to group people you know. For
example, you might include a circle of friends, another circle with coworkers, and a third circle
of family members. You could then send out a message regarding a family reunion just to your
family circle because your coworkers or friends might not be interested. These targeted groups
are also possible in Facebook, but Google+™ makes this a more streamlined and centralized
feature.
The battle between Facebook and Google+™ will continue, and in the meantime there are other
social networks that are important to explore.
LinkedIn®
While Facebook is for fun, LinkedIn® (at http://www.LinkedIn.com) is a valuable Web application
for business networking. If Facebook wears shorts and sandals, then LinkedIn® is dressed in a suit
and tie. First and foremost, LinkedIn® is a business network. According to Jason Alba in his book
I’m on LinkedIn—Now What???, there are four main groups of people who set up accounts here.
The first are professionals who want to share their skills with the world. This type of exposure
can assist in finding clients. Second are those who are looking for jobs. LinkedIn ® can help them
find out who is hiring and also get leads from friends. Third, LinkedIn® is for recruiters and those
who are in charge of hiring people to work at their organizations. Finally, LinkedIn ® is for
entrepreneurs who have established a company and are looking to create an online presence,
define a new brand, or find partners, investors, and customers (Alba, 2007, p. 14). In short, if you
are in the business world, you should be on LinkedIn®. LinkedIn® is becoming an indispensible tool for
professional networking. Do you know anyone who has found a job or a business opportunity through LinkedIn®?
LinkedIn® Profile and Contacts
Just as with Facebook, when you set up your account with LinkedIn® (which is also free) you will
create a profile of yourself. Unlike Facebook, you will spend more time entering a description of
your educational background and work history. Think of your LinkedIn® profile as an online
version of your resume. You should also upload a photo of yourself to personalize your profile.
Once you complete your profile, you will want to start searching for contacts you know. This
process is very similar to finding friends on Facebook. You can search for one person at a time, or
you can import contacts (select Contacts from the upper menu bar and then Add Connections)
from your email system, and LinkedIn® can determine whether they have accounts. Decide which
people you want to invite and then send a message saying, “Join my network on LinkedIn®.”
LinkedIn® Recommendations
Recommendations are important in LinkedIn®, just as in the business world. The difference is that
all of your contacts here can see your recommendations of other people, and also what others
have said about you. Once you have built up your contact list, select three people with whom you
have worked and write a recommendation for each of them. You might also suggest that they
return the favor for you.
LinkedIn® Network
On LinkedIn®, your network extends beyond your primary contacts. Just as in the real world,
where a “friend of a friend” might help you, there is something similar with LinkedIn ®. All of
your contacts are broken down into three main tiers. The first is your primary contacts, known as
Your Connections, and they are defined with an icon of a circle with a number 1 inside. These are
all the people you have invited directly to join your network, and those whose invitations you
have accepted. The next network level is called Two Degrees Away, and it includes all the
associates of your primary contacts mentioned above. The third network level is called Three
Degrees Away, and it includes friends of the friends of your primary contacts. LinkedIn® allows
you to search all of these people and contact them directly through what it calls an Introduction.
For example, if you are interviewing at a company and you see that one of your Three Degrees
Away contacts works there, you might introduce yourself to learn more about the company and
its needs. This is why LinkedIn® is so powerful.
To understand the power of LinkedIn®, consider the statistics in the following example. You can
transform just 62 of your own contacts into more than 10,000 friends of friends. When you
consider all their friends, your network can easily reach more than a million people.
Technology Today: The Influence of Social Networking Sites
With so many people using social networking sites, what impact is all this social networking having on society at
large?
The media often portrays social networkers as social misfits more interested in chatting with virtual friends than
making real ones. There also have been sensational stories about teens committing suicide as a result of
“cyberbullying” taking place on social networks.
But people who regularly follow the impact of technology on society argue that when it comes to social networks,
the positives far outweigh the negatives.
That certainly was the conclusion drawn by a team of researchers at Michigan State University that spent three years
studying how undergraduates use Facebook. A research team member posted these comments on a New York Times
online forum regarding the impact of social networks on society (Dubner, 2008):
Our original motivation was to better understand why individuals would voluntarily use a site that,
based on media reports, offered them only a way to disclose information they shouldn’t disclose,
collect hundreds of “friends” they didn’t know, and waste time better spent studying. What we
found surprised us.
These students were using Facebook to increase the size of their social network, and therefore,
their access to more information and diverse perspectives. They used the site to look up old high
school acquaintances, to find out information about people in their classes or dorms that might be
used to strike up a conversation, to get contact information for friends, and many other activities.
These aren’t the kinds of Facebook activities you are likely to read about in the media, which have
encouraged widespread public concern about Facebook use by young people.
Other studies are busting myths surrounding social networking as well. For instance, Facebook reports that its
greatest growth now comes from the 35- to 49-year-old age group, and 50- to 64-year-olds are joining the site at
twice the rate of teens (Corbett, 2009).
These numbers may be skewed somewhat by the fact that teens and young adults were early adopters, which means
there are fewer of them left to sign up. Still, the growth in adoption among older generations indicates that social
networking is becoming a mainstream activity.
Even the most conservative of businesspeople are flocking to sites like LinkedIn® because they find them to be useful
tools for building—and maintaining—stronger business relationships. Major corporations are setting up Facebook
fan pages and Twitter accounts in order to keep customers abreast of their latest products. Some companies now
assign employees to monitor social networks for any negative comments about their products or services. This allows
them to resolve problems or create strategies to alleviate negative public perception before that information gets
to the mainstream media.
Although social networking is still in its infancy, all indications are that it will continue growing and maturing for
some time to come. The question is whether its positives will continue to outweigh its negatives over the long term.
Some optimistic observers believe social networks could potentially change the world for the better by making it
easier for people from different cultures to see—and better understand—viewpoints from different parts of the
world.
(continued) CHAPTER 7 Section 7.3 Social and Business Networking
A Culture Clash
Many instances of social networks have been sparking global debates. One case occurred when Molly Norris, a
Seattle-based cartoonist, objected to the Comedy Central network editing a portion of its South Park program that
would have depicted the Prophet Mohammed in a bear costume.
Muslims believe that any drawing of Mohammed is blasphemous. But Norris felt Comedy Central, as a U.S.-based
network, was violating the free speech rights of the South Park producers. She created a Facebook page and
launched a contest encouraging artists to submit their best drawings of Mohammed.
Roughly a month later, 40,000 people had registered support for the contest, while more than 50,000 had registered
on a separate page opposing the idea. Thousands of people also took to the streets of Pakistan to protest the contest,
causing that country’s government to block access to Facebook until the contest page was removed (Hill, 2010).
This incident clearly shows social media’s ability to quickly disseminate opposing views on an issue. But will these
tools become powerful enough to stop opposing sides from shouting at each other, and instead encourage them to
actually resolve their differences? Only time will tell.
Links for More Information
For a visual on who uses different social networking sites, visit:
http://www.hypebot.com/hypebot/2013/03/social-demographics-who-uses-facebook-tumblr-twitter-pinterestinstagram-infographic.html
For information about some pros and cons of social media, see:
http://readingeagle.com/article.aspx?id=412755
Questions to Consider
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
Is online networking only for fun?
What is the most popular social networking site on the Web?
What is the status update question that you answer about yourself on Facebook?
What is the name of the location on Facebook where you post status updates and comments to your friends?
Why is discretion an important guide for what you post on Facebook?
What is the most popular business networking site on the Web?
What is the difference between social networking and business networking?
Define the three main connection tiers on LinkedIn®.
Technology Today: The Influence of Social Networking Sites (continued)
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