1.1 Motivation
As membership in Social Network Sites (SNS) become more regionalized and set (boyd
& Ellison, 2008), what companies will survive (if any)? And what will be the critical success factors for those who survive?
Clearly, individuals’ Internet use has changed since the introduction of the World Wide Web and it has even evolved since the dot com bubble burst early this decade. More now than ever the web is becoming a place where individuals make connections, interact, and share information irrespective of geography. This paper will examine the role of SNS1 in the “new World Wide Web.”
The idea for this thesis was fostered out of a paper (MacKay, 2008) written for a prior class about Facebook. The main focus of that research was on the changing nature of trust in online sources with SNS in general and Facebook in specific playing major roles as actors in this shift.
For that paper, the working hypotheses involved the lowering of the trust barriers to Internet interactions because of SNS. Especially initially on the Internet, there had been low trust thresholds of the medium for consumers (Siao & Shen, 2003). With the advent of SNS, a shift might have occurred in the trust felt between the social actors. Luo (2002) suggested that connections that occur between like-minded people create another trust tie
1 For the purpose of this paper I have decided to use SNS (Social Network (web)Sites). This term and acronym has been used by prominent scholars (Dwyer et al. 2007; Beer 2008; boyd and Ellison 2008;
Hargittai 2008) and others. Some scholars have other terms specifying the web relationship such as “web-based” or “online”.
and a feeling of shared binding. Social Network Sites tend to be websites where like-minded people interact. For example, MySpace is a site where members share their music likes and dislikes. Cyworld is a site where Koreans can share elements of their culture and make ilchons (discussed later in paper). Maybe this meant that there was a higher trust level in the SNS.
The experiment for that project was unsuccessful but something else happened just as I was completing that essay. My wife, who is an English teacher and owns a language school in Hsinchu, Taiwan, was participating in her own unofficial SNS experiment.
Over the last several years, she has been running her small English language learning school out of her parents’ home and has been interested in increasing her class sizes and adding a number of classes. Although she had gotten some new students through word of mouth, she was looking to add more students. She had advertised in a variety of manners but her advertising was met with skepticism maybe because she did not have a name brand. She had not been able to recruit any students from her advertisement using locally hung posters or by handing out flyers at local elementary schools.
Also, she had been an active member of a SNS in Taiwan called BabyHome. So she had the idea of advertising her classes on this SNS. She posted a note on an open forum listing her class openings. So members could read this forum and then check her individual site out before replying to this appeal. Before long she had a number of inquiries and a number of students signed up almost immediately. Why had she been successful in this virtual space where she had been unsuccessful in person? My original hypothesis from the Facebook paper had again looked correct. SNS could be responsible for lowering trust barriers (MacKay, 2008).
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1.2 Contribution
This area of research is relatively new as SNS have been part of popular culture for less than ten years now. It is scholarship that is in its early stages (Beer, 2008) and for that reason it is crucial to map the development and to set the definitions for what exactly is SNS.
Web 2.0 is also an important new area of scholarship. SNS have been linked to Web 2.0 applications on many occasions (O’Reilly, 2005; Skiba et al., 2006; Anderson, 2007;
Parise & Guinan, 2008). This paper will answer the question whether the group SNS truly a subset of the group Web 2.0. The research will examine the trends in Web 2.0 and determine whether they apply to SNS.
This is an important link as there are questions about the viability of all Web 2.0 applications and this group of applications is garnering much interest from scholars, entrepreneurs, investors and the general public. If this connection is a false one, it would be important to note the differences and if it is a correct one, how do SNS fit in with the other Web 2.0 applications?
This paper will discuss the varying geographic locations of differing services. This paper will also develop experimental quantitative research depicting the reasons that customers stick with specific SNS in some cases despite access to deemed superior websites. There are a number of studies specifically dealing with technology adoption especially concerning websites. Interestingly, there are not as many dealing with the continuous use of websites and retaining customers (Li et al., 2006). This paper will show that this market is getting pretty mature so retaining customers is becoming more important. So
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keeping that in mind, the experimental research will investigate areas of focus in order to enhance customer retention.
All of these topics were deemed worthy of further study by the preeminent SNS researchers boyd and Ellison (2008). Also, “the feedback loop” of information will be discussed. This idea implies that there are some marketing opportunities seemingly built into SNS as users share important feedback within the system (Beer, 2008).
As this thesis has been a relatively exhaustive in the study of SNS and has turned up little in the way of sorting SNS, this study will also aim to classify SNS and to list popular business models.
1.3 Aim for Thesis
The aim for this thesis is to report findings about the shifts in computing user habits, especially regarding trust and SNS. The scholarship in this field is relatively new so in order to contribute meaningfully to the existing body of work some effort will be made to summarize the research and to make clarifications or modifications where necessary.
There are three important areas of discussion that are addressed in this paper: social psychology, business and technology. All three of these sections are linked and significant and all three of these areas are addressed in some manner in this paper. There has been a shift in the way that people are using the Internet. This shift in technology use is documented in the discussion of Web 2.0 and the advent of SNS. This shift in how users interact on the web has in turn had an effect on the way they interact with other
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individuals thru the Internet. In this paper, social interaction in SNS is investigated and an experiment is conducted to try to better understand behavior patterns and customer retention on SNS. Because there has been a shift in how people interact with each other in this changing medium, businesses should look at the technology to see how they can benefit from it. This paper attempts to shed some light on where the technology may be leading us. It also discusses the strengths of the technology and possible future use especially with regard to network marketing.
1.4 Methodology
This current and rapidly evolving topic will be reported by canvassing a variety of current sources. Also, this is an article on the changing nature of the Internet so the research will take an extensive online approach. First, the literature review will examine the trends in the web media especially since the dot.com bubble burst early this decade. Appropriate sources for this literature review would be journals, web articles and even weblogs. Also used to inform this research is a survey using the web service surveymonkey.com will be sent to respondents by email. The statistical research concerns maintaining customer satisfaction with SNS.
The format of this thesis has been partially borrowed from the thesis of Ilana Davidi (2006) from the Sloan School of Business at MIT who did her research on wiki sites.
Similar to that study, this one will look at a Web 2.0 application. Also, the studies conducted by Li et al. (2006) concerning technology retention and Mahotra and Galletta
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(1999) adapting the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) were instrumental in the development of the research model used.
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