Harrison Godspower - 74111466 - Final Assignment -Advantages and Disadvantages of Social Media in the Business Ecosystem PDF

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Final Assignment - Develop an Essay Advantages and Disadvantages of Social Media in the Business Ecosystem

Godspower Harrison Ufot USW ID number 74111466 Induction Module: USW-IND-101 Anneta Benzar 21st September, 2019.

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“Nearly 3 in 4 United State adults uses the social media (YouTube)”, (Andrew, 2019). Building from the many successes of the internet since its invention, the social media have been a huge disruption in the business ecosystem. It has ultimately change the way businesses are being conducted in the 21st century, from product and services development, marketing revolutions to payment options, consumers feedback channels and large options of service providers to choose from. These and many other factors arguably can be said to have affected the business ecosystem positively and negatively. This article aims to explore some of the advantages and disadvantages of the social media in the business environment with intent to harness the benefits while avoiding the pitfalls. Apparently, at the end of this essay, it will be easier to evaluate whether the effect of social media on business environment is in the positive direction or not.

Social Media is generally described as the used of web-based or mobile technologies to interactively communicate in a form of social dialogue. Trisha (2012). Initially, it started as a tool that connect people together irrespective of their locations and engages discussions of common interest, but now the entire dynamics have change and these changes are affecting the global business ecosystem. The likes of Yahoo Chat Rooms, MSN messenger, and other similar forum were trail blazers to the vigorous shift produced by Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram, Youtube, Pinterest, Twitter, Snapchat, and many others. Presenting her authored Internet Trend Report 2018, Mary Meeker stated that, “at 3.6Billion, the number of internet users has surpassed half the world’s population”. Meeker (2018).

With this kind of statistics, it is only intuitive for business operations across the world to leverage on the huge market available in the internet enabled social media to sell their products and render services. These development which is generally referred to as electronic commerce has given ample opportunities to start-ups and other young businesses to compete favorably with their advanced counterparts. The content driven social media business ecosystem is to a large extent unbiased to all players. One of the reasons for this is because business owners can directly communicate with their consumers via the social media to get their feedbacks on any products or services and also get suggestions on how to improve on their customer satisfaction objectives. Another reason for the favorable business environment of the social media is its transparency. Product reviews and rating from end users actually informs the decision of other people whether to patronize a particular brand or not. It is now easier for a new brand to step into a market dominated by old brands because consumers will patronize a new brand if the reviews and rating on the social media is favorable.

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More so, with the innovations in online payment options and available delivery services, consumers can cut out middlemen and acquire their desired products or services in a cost effective manner. The vast options of brands to choose from create a level of satisfaction for clients who always want the best value for their money. The social media has also brought about accessibility of expert services to regions where such services were unavailable. Some of these expect services includes, medical consultations, higher education, professional services via virtual platforms, and regional partnership across all economic sectors (banking, real estate, energy, manufacturing, mining and many more). Companies now collaborate irrespective of distance to leverage on each other’s strength because of the open communication and interactive channels provided by the social media. Since the advent of the social media, the world is closer than ever before and inter-connection among people irrespective of culture, race, tribe, religion or political affiliations is on the increase. Indeed the world is a global village.

Enterprise Social Media (ESM) is another unique area that has enhanced the business ecosystem and improves team building, efficient operations and overall corporate performance. It is defined as: Web-based platforms that allow workers to communicate messages with specific coworkers or broadcast messages to everyone in the organization, explicitly indicate or implicitly reveal particular co-workers as communication partners, post, edit, and sort text and files linked to themselves or others; and view the messages, connections, text, and files communicated, posted, edited and sorted by anyone else in the organization at any time of their choosing. Paul, M., et al. (2013)

The social media with its numerous benefits is however, not without flaws. Connectivity involves bridging barriers and taking down fences, which also exposes people to various forms of vulnerability. For businesses to thrive, the environment should be reasonably favorable and secure. With the increase in cybercrimes, internet bullying, identity theft, unnecessary political intrusion into matters of sovereign states, terrorism, and economic sabotage; one could arguably imply that the internet enabled social media has contributed to a large extent to these menaces. Consumer’s appetites for foreign produce seems to be on the rise at the expense of their local economy, this is because as customers patronized foreign brands easily via the social media, they foster job creation in other climes, while their local brands close down as a result of low patronage which further contribute to unemployment in the local economy. In their research journal, Jacob P. et al. (2018) ‘proved that the use of social

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media continues to rise in developing countries, while it plateaus in the first economies’. Logically, this explains why the economies in Sub Saharan Africa continues to stagger at an average growth rate of 2.3% per annum while most companies in the first world have a far higher annual economic growth rate. World Bank Group (2019). The effect of social media usage growth rate in developing countries and its impact on their economy seems to be another area of research interest.

Furthermore, the

automation of business processes in order to fit into the internet appropriately seems to be causing loss of jobs in some sectors. This undoubtedly is a serious disadvantage to employees that are not tech savvy.

Nevertheless, businesses that cannot adapt to the moving trend of social media enabled e-commerce would be left for oblivion. The social media is an innovation that has come to stay, and it can only evolve into more technological advanced platform. Already, conventional business operations have adopted the template provided by the social media to run their internal activities. It is only optimal for stakeholders in the business ecosystem to mitigate the pitfalls of this disruptive technology and harness the ever increasing benefits of the innovation. It is also important for individuals and corporate bodies to be careful in sharing sensitive information across all social media platforms. However it is evaluated, the advantages of the social media far surpasses its disadvantages, especially as most of the drawbacks could be mitigated with better policies and corporations from stakeholders.

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References: Andrew H. (2019) The Demographics of Social Media in 2019[Infographic]. Available at: https://www.socialmediatoday.com/news/the-demographics-of-social-media-in-2019infographic/559894/ (Accessed: 20 September, 2019)

Burkhardt, A. (2010). ‘Social media: A guide for college and university libraries’. College & Research Libraries News, 71(1), 10-24. Association of College & Research Libraries [Online]. Available at: https://crln.acrl.org/index.php/crlnews/article/view/8302/8392 (Accessed: 20 September 2019)

Efraim T., Jon O., David K., Jae K., Ting-Peng L., and Deborrah C. (2017) Electronic Commerce 2018: A Managerial and Social Network Perspective. Ninth Edition. Gewerbestrasse 11, Cham, Switzerland:

Springer

International

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[Online].

Available

at:

https://books.google.com.ng/books? id=D9Q5DwAAQBAJ&dq=social+media+advantages+and+disadvantages+2018&lr=&source=gbs_n avlinks_s (Accessed: 20 September 2019). Jacob P., Caldwell B., and Hanyu C. (2018), ‘Social Media Use Continues To Rise in Developing Countries, but Plateaus Across Developed Ones’, Pew Research Center, (June, 19, 2018) pp. 1- 46, Global Attitudes & Trend [Online]. Available at: https://www.pewresearch.org/global/2018/06/19/socialmedia-use-continues-to-rise-in-developing-countries-but-plateaus-across-developed-ones/

(Accessed:

21

September 2019) Meeker, M., (2018) ‘Internet Trends Report 2018’, Kleiner Perkins (May, 30 th, 2018) [Online].

Available

at:

https://www.kleinerperkins.com/perspectives/internet-trends-report-2018/

(Accessed: 20 September 2019) Paul, M., Marleen H., and Charles S. (2013) ‘Enterprise Social Media: Definition, History and Prospects for the Study of Social Technologies in Organizations’, Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 19(1), pp. 1 – 19. International Communication Association [Online]. Available at: https://academic.oup.com/jcmc/article-abstract/19/1/1/4067484 (Accessed: 20 September 2019)

Smith, P. and Zook, Z. (2011) Marketing Communications: Integrating Offline and Online with Social Media. Fifth Edition. Pentonville,, London, United Kingdom: Kogan Page Limited [Online], Available

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at:

http://repository.fue.edu.eg/xmlui/bitstream/handle/123456789/4046/10254.pdf?sequence=1

(Accessed: 20 September 2019) Trisha D. Baruah (2012) ‘Effectiveness of Social Media as a Tool of Communication and its Potential for Technology enabled connections: A Micro-Level Study’, International Journal of Scientific and Research Publications, 2(5), pp.2250-3153. Krishna Kanta Handiqui State University, Assam, India [Online]. Available at: https://s3.amazonaws.com/academia.edu.documents/45712283/ijsrp-may-201224.pdf?response-content-disposition=inline%3B%20filename %3DEffectiveness_of_Social_Media_as_a_tool.pdf&X-Amz-Algorithm=AWS4-HMAC-SHA256&XAmz-Credential=AKIAIWOWYYGZ2Y53UL3A%2F20190925%2Fus-east1%2Fs3%2Faws4_request&X-Amz-Date=20190925T144310Z&X-Amz-Expires=3600&X-AmzSignedHeaders=host&X-AmzSignature=9ab57fe1a2fda134920c71d53865ebe106a90437467d654905d9baea4bd762fc (Accessed: 20 September 2019) World Bank Group (2019) The World Bank in Africa. Available at: https://www.worldbank.org/en/region/afr/overview (Accessed: 20 September 2019)

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