OL 326 5-2 Short Paper Five I’s Strategic Analysis PDF

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5-2 Short Paper: Five I’s Strategic Analysis Southern New Hampshire University OL 326- Social Environment of Business Professor John Schroeder Amanda Martin June 5, 2021

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Overview: Facebook is a social media networking site that was created in 2004 by Mark Zuckerburg. He took the idea from Harvard College to create a safe place where students could share information about themselves. Similar to Myspace, Facebook quickly became popular, but the one advantage that Facebook had over the competition was their privacy settings that allowed people to control who could see what information. While the company quickly grew to be successful, they began facing issues with security and fake news despite the privacy settings put in place. This paper will discuss the five I’s strategic analysis and use the method to take a closer look into Facebook. According to Lussier and Sherman (2014), “The 5 Is strategic analysis stages include: (1) issue identification; (2) interested strategic stake- holders; (3) incentive of stakeholders; (4) information—objectives; and (5) interaction strategies” (p. 52). The method is used to see how a company can best meet the needs of their stakeholders (Lussier & Sherman, 2014). Identification of the Issue: The main issues that Facebook is facing is public relations, more specifically, their media regulations and their Facebook news controversy. The company began filtering posts to protect the privacy of their stakeholders; while in countries like America where we have the freedom of speech, not all countries give their citizens this same freedom (Wells & Winkler, 2017). Facebook was intending to look out for each of their stakeholders by filtering and regulating what was being posted and shared on Facebook.com. While doing this, certain posts would get blocked from the page which would cause more issues among stakeholders as they wanted the

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freedom to share an iconic photo or important information as they saw fit. All while trying to regulate posts Facebook has another big issue; they spread fake news. According to Travers (2020), “they found Facebook to be the referrer site for untrustworthy news sources over 15% of the time” (para. 2). Facebook became even more widely known for their fake news during the 2016 election as the site was accused of only posting one sided and fake news (Wells & Winkler, 2017). Interested Strategic Stakeholders: In order to steer clear of further public relations issues, Facebook needs to know and understand who their stakeholders are. In an article by Chron Contributor (2020), it is said that, “customers, employees, communities and business partners are among key stakeholder groups that carry weight in company decisions and activities” (para. 1). Since Facebook has a wide variety of users across many different countries, the company will have a difficult time meeting the needs of them all as they will vary. In one country where the users have less freedoms, they may want Facebook to have more strict censorship of posts. On the other hand, in democratic countries such as the United States they want to be able to post what they want and exercise their freedom of speech (Wells & Winkler, 2017). The direction that Facebook is moving is for the benefit of their users, but if the users do not like the new policies and procedures that Facebook is issuing, then other stakeholders may find issues with them as well. The goal of fixing these issues would be for Facebook to meet the needs of all stakeholders and for them to hopefully avoid future public relation issues. Incentive of Stakeholders: Facebook has a wide variety of stakeholders as the social media platform is used world

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wide. The company has a responsibility to its stakeholders of protecting their privacy, maintaining transparency with them, making ethical decisions and being a trustworthy site. Stakeholders can have an impact on a company’s performance in a positive or negative way, so it is important that Facebook keeps its stakeholders a top priority. According to Chron Contributor (2020), “Understanding the positive and negative effects of stakeholders on company operations is especially important for small businesses” (para. 1). Facebook needs to take action against these issues for their stakeholders. The benefit of addressing these issues is that they will likely keep more of their stakeholders happy once the issues of media regulation and fake news are taken care of. This will help Facebook maintain its users, provide its users with accurate news information and continue to generate money. The cost of taking action on these issues is that it might be costly to regulate without being accused of censorship and filtering the fake news. Stakeholders can help Facebook with this issue by flagging posts and reporting people to the company so they can better address filtering out any fake news or avoid any censorship issues. Information About Issues: Facebook has made many efforts to correct their issues for their stakeholders, but the issues remain. One issue that arose was with the 2016 election and the spread of fake news as well as the accusation of censoring one political party more than the other. On one end there were issues with the strict censorship on conservative political posts so in return Zuckerburg seemed to have laxed up the censorship for republican presidential candidate Doland Trump (Wells & Winkler, 2017). Both issues caused many users to threaten to leave the platform if there were not changes made to the censorship policy. In an article by Lewontin (2016), “as a primary news source for its 1 billion daily users, Facebook could be a significant influence on what is considered true in a US election year” (para. 2). This has caused concern for the fact that

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stakeholders feel that Facebook can sway an election with what they choose to post, sensor, and the sharing of their fake news. Strategies for Interaction: Facebook continues to make an effort towards rectifying the public relations issues. In November 2016 it was reported that, “Facebook had been developing censorship tools to prevent certain content from being published in certain geographic areas, especially in China where the company had been banned in 2009” (Wells & Winkler, 2017, p. 15). This was a good step for Facebook towards the issues of censorship and media regulations. This allows Facebook to cater to each country more specifically. In China where they aren’t allowed to speak as freely Facebook can use stricter censorship, but in other countries like the U.S. where people want to use their freedom of speech they can censor less. In February 2017, Facebook sent a letter out to its users to inform them of the policy and procedure changes that Facebook was making in order to help prevent the spread of fake news within the company (Well & Winkler, 2017). The Wells and Winkler article (2017) also mentions that Mark Zuckerburg said “the most important thing we at Facebook can do is develop the social infrastructure to give people the power to build a global community that works for all of us” (p. 14). Facebook is also trying to bring their stakeholders together. This encourages unity and will hopefully get everyone to meet in the middle on some of these issues. Conclusion: While it appears that Facebook has made many efforts to correct their issues, their stakeholders still seem to have a problem with how the company is handling it. It seems that as soon as the company fixes one issue, someone has an issue with the new policy or procedure.

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The social media platform's wide variety of stakeholders is going to make it difficult for the company to please them all. While China wants strict censorship, Americans do not (Wells & Winkler, 2017). Facebook should continue to work on improving the public relations to best meet the needs of all of their many different stakeholders. While this is challenging for the company, they will benefit from the number of users they will retain by making the effort to correct these issues.

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References: Lewontin, M. (2016, May 11). Is Facebook reinforcing your political bias? The Christian Science Monitor. https://www.csmonitor.com/Technology/2016/0511/Is-Facebookreinforcing-your-political-bias. Lussier, R. N., & Sherman, H. (2014). Business, society, and government essentials: strategy and applied ethics. New York: Routledge. Travers, M. (2020, March 21). Facebook spreads fake news faster than any other social website, according to new research. Forbes. https://www.forbes.com/sites/traversmark/2020/03/21/facebook-spreads-fake-newsfaster-than-any-other-social-website-according-to-new-research/?sh=727f7db16e1a. Wells, J. R., & Winkler, C. A. (2017, September 14). Facebook fake news in the post -truth world. Harvard Business School. https://services.hbsp.harvard.edu/lti/links/contentlaunch....