Socal Media

Erik’s presentation on social media and the impact on corporations and consumers was eye-opening. As most of you know, I am pretty uneasy about social media because of privacy issues. However, Erik’s viewpoints have made me thinking about what is eluding me, the importance of understanding social media and the impacts on personal level and corporation alike. It doesn’t necessarily mean I will jump on the bandwagon right now and start to write on facebook or twit (I still prefer to keep my thoughts and information to myself), instead, I will start pay more attention to how social media technology is operating as well as the trends and future of the technology.

Erik had several important examples of how social media enable individuals to take on the big corporations. Any individual has the access to the mass media that was never within reach and has the level field to go to battle with big corporations. Although not all the individuals will catch the attention of media, but the fact that some non-technical individual was able to win the battle with corporations, like the musician’s battle with United Airline, is enough to make big corporations to pay close attentions to customers’ complains. However, the question I have is how do corporations to balance delicately the needs of customers and abuses from a few customers. “Customer is always right” is a good slogan, but in practice, it is impossible to satisfy every customer. The only defense I could think of is what Amy said in class, online community to policy itself, or corporations will file law suits against the abuser (of course, we will get into first amendment debate again, can we just drop that debate? Just kidding).

Enough about potential bad things could happen to the corporations. Let’s discuss the benefits for corporations. Erik used some great examples on how corporations to get online community involved in contributing ideas and knowledge. DELL asks customers what they wants, goldmine company used crow sourcing to find new gold location, and more recently NETFlex awarded a team of researchers for finding the best customer renting pattern. Those are some of the successful stories. But I think corporations should also open up for ideas to solve their problems within the companies. Before opening up to the world, corporations should open up to their employees. For example, how do you cut budget in a tough economic environment? Who knows that better than the employees and the managers who spend the money? They know how much and what to cut without jeopardizing the quality of the products and services. Instead of downsizing or outsourcing, CFOs just tell the employees that they need to come up to a total saving of x amounts. I have seen projects waste 50% of the budget just to meet the project requirement of within certain percentage of the budget. Crowd sourcing initiative inside the corporation is not wide spread yet in the corporate world, but it worth into that.