Page 329 - Using MIS

Q1 What Is a Social Media Information System (SMIS)? 297

solve an embarrassing problem, say to fix a product defect, then it would endeavor to constrain,
as much as it can, the communications to Community A.
The exponential nature of relationships via community tiers offers organizations both a
blessing and a curse. An employee who is a member of Community A can share her sincere
and legitimate pride in her organization’s latest product or service with hundreds or thousands
of people in her communities. However, she can also blast her disappointment at some recent
development to that same audience or, worse, inadvertently share private and proprietary orga-
nizational data with someone in that audience who works for the competition.
Social media is a powerful tool, and to use it well, organizations must know their goals and
plan accordingly, as you’ll learn.

SMIS Components

Because they are information systems, SMIS have the same five components as all IS: hardware,
software, data, procedures, and people. Consider each component for the roles shown in Figure 8-4.

Hardware
Both users and organizations process SM sites using desktops, laptops, and mobile devices. In
most cases, social media providers host the SM presence using elastic servers in the cloud.

Software

Users employ browsers and client applications to communicate with other users, send and
receive content, and add and remove connections to communities and other users. These appli-
cations can be desktop or mobile applications for a variety of platforms, including iOS, Android,
and Windows.
Social media providers develop and operate their own custom, proprietary, social network-
ing application software. As you learned in Chapter 4, supporting custom software is expensive
over the long term; SM application vendors must do so because the features and functions of
their applications are fundamental to their competitive strategy. They can do so because they
spread the development costs over the revenue generated by millions of users.
Many social networking vendors use a NoSQL database management system to process
their data, though traditional relational DBMS products are used as well. Facebook began
development of its own in-house DBMS (Cassandra), but later donated it to the open-source

Component Role Description

Hardware Social media providers Elastic, cloud-based servers
Users and communities Any user computing device
Software Social media providers Application, NoSQL or other DBMS, Analytics

Users and communities Browser, IOS, Android, Windows 8, and other applications
Data Social media providers Content and connection data storage for rapid retrieval
Users and communities User-generated content, connection data
Procedures Social media providers Run and maintain application (beyond the scope of this text)

Users and communities Create and manage content, informal, copy each other
People Social media providers Sta to run and maintain application (beyond the scope of
this text)
Figure 8-4 Users and communities Key users, adaptive, can be irrational
Five Components of SMIS