Final Essay

The internet has enormously changed the way we live and similarly, how businesses conduct its activities. It impacts almost every facet of our lives and has greatly influenced how we interact with each other. It gave birth to social media and social networking, providing anyone with internet a platform to connect, communicate, interact and share information and experiences with anyone in the world. This social networking phenomenon may have started with a purpose of sharing information within personal networks such as family and friends and serve as a playground to have fun and to be entertained but it also evolved to become a valuable networking resource for companies, employers, employees and jobseekers alike. (DigitalTrends, 2014). In

But Facebook, although arguably considered as the most popular of all social networking sites (SNS), is just one of the many websites available today used for social networking. There is not a single agreed upon definition of social media and social networking and often these two terms are used interchangeably (Boyd & Ellison, 2007). And, it would require us to further zoom out and understand two other related concepts: Web 2.0 and User Generated Content. Web 2.0 is an umbrella term comprising web technologies and applications such as blogs, RSS (really simple syndication - web feeds used to publish frequently updated content), peer-to-peer contact (P2P), wikis, mashups and tags (Murugesan, 2007). O’Reilly (2007) describes Web 2.0 as “the network platform spanning all connected devices” where technology gets better the more people use it. It does not have a hard boundary (O’Reilly, 2007) and instead, the content and applications are continually modified by all users in a collaborative and interactive manner (Kaplan & Haenlein, 2010), also known as user generated content (UGC). Perhaps the most widely cited definition of social media is that of Kaplan & Haenlein’s

The rise of a generation of ‘digital natives’ (Kaplan & Haenlein, 2010) for example, is a key driver to its growth and popularity. The authors further categorize this wide spectrum into six important types namely collaborative projects, blogs, content communities, social networking sites, virtual game worlds and virtual social worlds (Kaplan & Haenlein, 2010). A useful framework proposed by Kietzman, Hermkens, McCarthy & Silvestre (2011) called the “Honeycomb of Social Media” would allow us to better explain how and why users engage in different social media activities as well as help firms understand how to engage with their target audience better. The seven functional building blocks are identity, conversations, sharing, presence, relationships, reputation and groups. Social networking therefore, ties-in to these functional building blocks, that is, a user (or a group of people and organizations for that matter) can create an identity online through various social networking sites, share and discuss, associate with others, build reputation, and even form groups or communities. These blocks, however, are neither mutually exclusive nor do they all have to be present in a social media