Social Media: Implications for Organizations

Social media are network-based applications allowing users to share and experience content with other users of those applications, typically via the Internet. Many types of social media are currently available to Internet users, including social network sites (e.g., Facebook), wikis (e.g., Wikipedia), social bookmarking services (e.g., Digg), forums and bulletin boards (e.g., Reddit), blogs (e.g., WordPress), and microblogs (e.g., Twitter). Social media also vary by their facilitator’s intent and include both personal (e.g., Tumblr) and business (e.g., LinkedIn) purposes. Existing social media applications can be utilized by organizations, or new social media applications specific to the organization can be hosted or licensed.

When choosing to host or license their own social media applications, organizations can deploy them in two ways. External social media are customer facing ...