Page 337 - Using MIS

Q3 How Do SMIS Increase Social Capital? 305

Questions

1. Visit www.salesforce.com/chatter to learn about Chatter’s Chatter or other SM site. How can an organization use such
features and applications. How could Chatter affect value reporting in the context of machine, customer, and employee
chain activities? social media?
2. How might Chatter help Apple Inc. create better products? 5. How might machines use foursquare (location-based social
3. Why would employees, managers, and owners like to use networking)? Consider machine-to-machine interactions as
Chatter? Consider each individually. well as human-to-machine interactions.
4. One example of social media for machines is having machines 6. Could machine-to-machine social interactions lead to security
report operational status data (say speed, temperature, fuel or privacy concerns? How?
usage, and so on, depending on the type of machine) to a

Using Social Networking to Increase the Number
of Relationships

In a traditional business relationship, a client (you) has some experience with a business, such
as a restaurant or resort. Traditionally, you may express your opinions about that experience
by word of mouth to your social network. If you are an influencer in your social network, your
opinion may force a change in others’ behavior and beliefs.
However, such communication is unreliable and brief: You are more likely to say something
to your friends if the experience was particularly good or bad; but, even then, you are likely only
to say something to those friends whom you encounter while the experience is still recent. And
once you have said something, that’s it; your words don’t live on for days or weeks.
However, what if you could use SM to communicate your experience using text, pictures,
and video instantly to everyone in your social network? For example, suppose a wedding
photographer uses social media to promote her business by asking a recent client (user 1) to
“like” her Facebook page and the wedding photos that are posted there (Figure 8-6). She also
tags people in the client’s pictures on Facebook. She may even ask the client to tweet about her
experience.
All of the people in the client’s social network (users 4–6) see the likes, tags, and tweets. If
user 6 likes the pictures, they might be seen by users 10–12. It’s possible that one of those users
is looking for a wedding photographer. Using social media, the photographer has thus grown
her social network to reach potential clients who she wouldn’t have otherwise had access to.
She also used SM to grow the number of relationships she has with clients. Depending on the
number, strength, and value of those relationships, her social capital within those networks
could substantially increase.
Such relationship sales have been going on by word of mouth for centuries; the difference
here is that SMIS allow such relationships to scale to levels not possible in the past. In fact,
the photographer in our example might even consider paying the client for the opportunity to
take the wedding pictures if the client were a famous celebrity with hundreds of thousands of