T17 Group 4: Hassan, Ashley, Megan, Sandeep, Benjamin
Contents
Introduction
Through the use of Internet anyone with a computer can network with others across the world. With the introduction of Facebook, Internet based networking and interactions has become increasingly popular. This new networking has led to both advantages and disadvantages of it's everyday use. The positive aspects of facebook include advertising through targeting youth to certain areas of the website such as the marketplace. Also, one can network world wide through pictures, notes, chat sessions. Furthermore, Facebook is used by students in group projects to help them keep in touch with one another. However, networking can have a negative affect on employees and businesses as companies can observe their employee's lifestyle choices. Although sharing pictures and personal experiences on facebook can seem to be innocent fun, people can take it too far. This can lead to obsessive behavior by veiwers, and in extreme cases, stalking. As Facebook is so easy to access and use, we, as a society are using it as a primary mode of communication. Communication in general has shifted away from face-to- face conversation and towards internet based sites.
Advantages
The marketplace
Facebook launched its own integrated version of classifieds on the site, called Facebook Marketplace. The marketplace is much better integrated with the rest of the site and as a result does a much better job of taking advantage of the social networking aspects of Facebook.
How To 'Buy and Sell' at the Marketplace
The Facebook Marketplace is 'Facebook's self-service solution for listing items for sale, housing for rent, jobs available, and so on. In addition to listing items for sale you can also list items you are looking for, or simply search for items others may have listed. When you navigate to facebook.com/marketplace, you are automatically redirected to your networks' marketplace home.
From here you can see the listings you have made, the listings your friends have made, or add new listings. From the top tabbed-navigation you can choose to look at items from any of your networks. The site also allows you to click 'Other' and navigate to any other networks Facebook operates in and see items from there or list your item in those networks. Right below the networks you see the latest listings in the various categories from the network tab that you have selected and to the right of the categorized listings you can see the options to either 'Add a new listing' which is used to list an item you want to sell, and or list things you want.
Adding a Listing
There are four categories in which you can list items.
- For Sale - Includes books, furniture, electronics, and tickets, etc.
- Housing - Includes apartments for rent, sublets to offer, etc.
- Jobs - career opportunities, part-time work, internships, etc.
- Other - Includes everything else that doesn't fit above.
When listing an item, you are asked for some required fields such as item name and description. You also have the option to limit the listing to your Facebook profile, your primary network, your secondary network, and everyone else. You can upload up to 4 photos while creating a listing. More can be added once the listing has been created.
The form-fields for all categories are completely customized and ask for information that makes each listing incredibly thorough; as a result, the information you have to add, and can add, optionally varies based on the item you are listing. Once you enter the information mentioned above, you are given a preview of your listing when you are done.
Making Transactions
If you find an item that you want to buy, Facebook allows you to contact the seller through the site but does not allow you to buy it on the site. What is great is that when you find something interesting and click on it, the site tells you how you know the seller.
Facebook Marketplace is truly integrated into the site,the ability to share your listing with your primary and secondary networks, as well as specific friends, and the ability to see who exactly you are making a transaction with and to know how you know a buyer or seller, makes Facebook Marketplace a truly great extension of Facebook's social network.
Facebook Marketing solutions
Facebook offers unique marketing opportunities to both established brands and emerging companies. Based on our experience with more Facebook clients, use a combination of Facebook Pages, engagement applications and Connecting tools to help their brands create an effective “Brand Presence” in Facebook.
Facebook Pages – Creating an Effective “Brand Hub”
Using Facebook to engage your audinece often begins with a well-designed and integrated Brand Page that acts as a social “hub” within Facebook.Clients and agencies work on their strategy, design,
implementation and mangement of their Pages to establish their presence and set the stage for targeted engagement efforts.
Facebook Applications – Driving Social Momentum. Effective Facebook applications do more than just compete for attention – they offer real value to a brandʼs audience and extend their primary product or service into the social web. the designing, building and hosting integrated engagement applications drive social momentum by enabling audiences to engage with brands on Facebook in a meaningful way.
Facebook Campaigns – Amplifying Marketing ROI.
It has been established that by creating campaigns in Facebook that integrate with brand Pages and take advantage of the social momentum from engagement applications, companies can dramatically amplify the effectiveness of their online marketing return on investment.
10 easy steps to: Build your personal brand on facebook.
- Know your audience
- Decide on your brand strategy
- Fill out your profile completely- emphasis on education and skills
- Import contacts and grow your network
- Update your status - including links to your blogs and resume
- Start or join a group page
- Start an event in your area
- Link out to your facebook profile
- Feed your social networks
- set your privacy settings
Worldwide Networking
Facebook is a very popular worldwide networking website which allows everyone to stay connected through pictures, chat, notes and groups. “Social network sites are web-based services that allow individuals to construct a public or semi-public profile within a bounded system, articulate a list of other users with whom they share a connection, and view and traverse their list of connections and those made by others within the system.” (Boyd, Ellison 2007). Facebook witnessed a 153% growth in its total number of users from 2007 to 2008, making it first place amongst other social networking sites with 22% worldwide users. It is also the number one photo sharing application on the web, with having more than 14 million photos uploaded daily.
By allowing people to upload photos, family and friends can stay connected with each other by viewing photos they put up from their travels, events, and everyday life by simply signing on to their facebook account. Users can choose to instant chat with friends that they have added and or gave permission to add them, making it even easier to stay connected with people all over the world. Facebook can be accessed on any computer, which allows people to chat more consistently even if you are half way across the world. By using a social networking website you can also reconnect with people from the past, and join common interest groups, which can introduce you to meet new people with similar interests. Groups are created by people to help engage and advertise a message to strangers and friends with common interests. You can also plan group projects and express your ideas through message threads, which is more convenient then having to meet frequently. Facebook can unite people in various ways, it helps connect you with people from the past, the present, from people far away, close, or with people you have never met but just share a common interest. Social networking websites gives you the chance to stay in touch with anyone you want with putting in little effort.
Disadvantages
Businesses and Employees
Although Facebook is a useful tool in both the corporate sector and private sector there are many drawbacks that lead business employers to ban Facebook in their companies. Two of the many problems include:
- Distraction
- Company and Employee Safety
Distraction
Facebook may be used for business related projects or to interact with coworkers directly. However, majority of the employees that access Facebook during work hours are not using it for business. As stated by Lublin in 2007, "Employees are wasting inordinate time on Facebook...reality that most use it exclusively for nonbusiness purposes". Using Facebook, users can access other's pictures, notes, wall messages, market, and play games. Taking a quick glance at Facebook can lead to hours of doing nothing except searching into other people lives. The hours spent on Facebook at work decreases the hours spent on corporate work at work. This causes a disadvantage to the company because the time given to employee's is not efficiently used. This can cause a companies overall prosperity to decline. On an online Australian survey 55% of bosses have banned Facebook in their companies and employees have admitted(Papworth,2009):
- 1 in 3 (28%) hid their screens from their boss so they could use their social network sites undetected.
- 24% of 18-24 year olds confess to avoiding additional work tasks to make time to use social network sites
- 17% skip lunch breaks to justify the time they spend on social network sites
- 8% explained that they had been in trouble after being caught on social network sites
- 66% believed that Facebook is for play as well and they accepted friend requests from work colleagues.
As shown by this survey many employees are easily distracted by Facebook and use their work hours to surf other poeple's profiles. In an article found by another Australian website nearly $5 billion dollars is lost in worker productivity.
Company and Employee Safety
As many workers are using Facebook in their free time at work or outside of work, many post personal information about their life and what they are doing. Facebook "status" allows users to put up how their are feeling or what they are doing right now. Lublin, 2007, states that "Facebook allows users to post information online for others to see...potentially compromise a company's reputation, trade secrets or its competitive advantage.". As stated, this can cause a companies reputation to fall and can cause a variety of rumours to spread quickly. Furthermore, employees have just as much risk as companies do when using Facebook. Companies may look at a user's profile before deciding to hire the person. Based on wall posts, pictures, notes, and other personal messages posted around the website a employer can decide whether he wants to hire a person. This can seem unjust as it creates a relationship between a user's personal life and work life. Not only do employers look at profiles before hiring but also during their time with the company. There have been stories of people that have been fired due to their discriminatin pictures, statuses, etc. For example a 16 year old girl was fired from her job at work because she posted on her status that her job was boring. After her employers saw that they immediately fired her stating "Following your comments made on Facebook about your job and the company we feel it is better that, as you are not happy and do not enjoy your work we end your employment"(Matyszczyk,2009). This is not the only case that has been found. A young man was fired from his job in London by changing his status to "F*** Partnership". His coworkers used this against him and had him fired immediately. The young man defended himself by stating "what I wrote was private. You would never get sacked for saying something like that in the pub."(Haber,2008). As all the generations are now becoming computer literate it is becoming dangerous to post up any information about themselves on the internet. Anything found on the internet can be accessed by anybody and can be used against them.
Personal Safety
Facebook Stalking
- A covert method of investigation using facebook.com. Good for discovering a wealth of information about people you don't actually know.
- Person 1: Did you go to the _________ party last night?
- Person 2: No, but I was routinely facebook stalking (insert name of person you have never actually spoken to but have frequently visited his/her facebook profile)'s photos and saw pictures from it. It looked fetch.
Facebook Stalker
- Someone who is obsessed with someone else and stalks him or her on facebook.com. Not always traceable or noticeable, but clues are: wall posts replying to every status update, viewing every posted picture of the stalked, etc.
- I think Hillary is turning into a facebook stalker, she replies to all of my status updates.
Signs of a Facebook Stalker
Signs you may be an addicted Facebook stalker:
- You and your significant other get in a fight because he/she does not want to be officially Facebook dating yet.
- You check a select persons profile more than 5-10 times a day.
- You throw yourself a Facebook party when you reach the big marks: 50 friends, 100 friends, and 200 friends…
- You regularly read through the list of groups so that you can be sure to add yourself to clubs such as “We love Boy Meets World” and “Cut the Mullet”
- You make your first priority to check your email in the morning, just in case someone added you or messaged your facebook account overnight
- You feel faint or shaky during work or class—and other times when you don’t have access to Facebook.
Real Life Stalking Case
A woman in Sydney was allegedly raped by a man she met on facebook who had been posing as a fashion director in his online profile. She was an aspiring model and did not take proper precautions before meeting the gentleman. It is important to note this, as anyone can be anyone on facebook. There are certain methods facebook uses to prevent this (i.e. networks, “friends only” profile status, and invite only groups), however, it is frighteningly easy to get around these. Although on thinks they are invincible and are being careful, it is better safe than sorry especially in an online site so gigantic as Facebook.
A survey done at Swarthmore College revealed some interesting facts about student Facebook use. Most students use the phrase” I am facebook stalking you” regularly and with little thought. It is true that this can be harmless; Facebook in a way was made for this causal window into all of ones friends’ lives. However, when ones observations become concentrated on one person, you check their profile and events intermittently throughout the day, are always reading their wall posts, and use this information to talk about them to others as if they were a close friend of yours, it can be considered crossing the hazy line.
There are many faces to Facebook, not all of them pretty. As a society we need to continue to take necessary precautions when using networking sites like facebook, and any online chat site in general.
Communication
Designed to act as a social utility connecting people around the world, Facebook and other social networks may ultimately deteriorate face to face interaction. Facebook acts as an effective tool to manage weaker relationships with people seldom seen, however it is possible that it can actually lead to weakening such ties ever further.
Conservatively, ‘Happy Birthday’ was to be physically said in a person’s presence. This deteriorated into mail, then cards, then telephone calls, email, text messaging, and now we can show people that we ‘care for them’ by Facebook doing it for us, telling us to say Happy Birthday online whenever a friend’s birthday arrives. This questionably reduces any sincerity truly expressed between two people when using this medium. Ultimately, it is entirely possible that existing friendships may diminish because rather than putting an effort to actually meet up and have some quality time spent speaking together, Facebook can mislead into feeling that the friendship is healthy and that the minute online interactions are sufficient enough. Facebook is redefining the word ‘friendship’. The emotions experienced laughing and interacting with fellow humans can significantly influence your health, and scientists have claimed they are impossible to replicate. If friendships are redefined by Facebooks online interaction, we may be be deprived of these benefits of face to face communication. Another example is that Face to Face interaction requires greater understanding and gives less time to think of quick or witty reaction, and therefore keeps our minds much healthier over prolonged online contact, which is no substitute for raw human interaction.
Since online interaction is so easy and accessible, it is possible that people may be allured into a larger dependence on online interaction rather than face the risks of face-to-face interaction, and in the process deteriorate real friendships due to the false sense of sufficient communication that Facebook may deceive us to believe.
Ultimately we must remember that there is no substitute for human interaction, despite what Facebook may lead us to believe.
Conclusion
While at first glance Facebook may seem to be just innocent social networking website, it can lead to obsessive behavior by veiwers, and in extreme cases, stalking. As Facebook is so easy to access and use, we, as a society are using it as a primary mode of communication. Communication in general has shifted away from face-to- face conversation and towards internet based sites.
References
- Flevelle, D. (2007, May 4). Worries follow rise of Facebook. The Star.Retrieved from http://www.thestar.com/Business/article/210313.
- http://www.femail.com.au/myspace-and-facebook-banned-in-offices.htm
- http://www.thewest.com.au/default.aspx?MenuID=145&ContentID=37801
- http://news.cnet.com/8301-17852_3-10172931-71.html
- http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=facebook+stalking
- http://apps.facebook.com/causes/125535?m=7bf7bab2
- http://naturalbias.com/is-facebook-bad-for-your-health
- http://www.jazarah.net/blog/facebook-tops-social-networking-site-with-22-of-the-total-worldwide-users/
- http://www.web-strategist.com/blog/2008/01/09/social-network-stats-facebook-myspace-reunion-jan-2008/
- http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol13/issue1/boyd.ellison.html
- http://www.stepchangegroup.com
- Schawbel B. (2009, April 9). "How to: build your personal brand on facebook"http://mashable.com/2009/04/02/facebook-personal-brand/
