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Models of Participation in Social Networks

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Models of Participation in Social Networks Models of participation in Social Networks Giulio Angiani, Paolo Fornacciari, Eleonora Iotti, Monica Mordonini, Michele Tomaiuolo Department of Information Engineering, University of Parma, Italy ABSTRACT Social networking systems are bringing a growing number of acquaintances online, both in the private and working spheres. In businesses, several traditional information systems, such as CRMs and ERPs, have also been modified in order to include social aspects. Social network analysis can be useful to cope with common business problems, including: launching distributed teams, retaining people with vital knowledge for the organization, improving access to knowledge and spreading ideas and innovation. However, these goals are often frustrated by difficulties, including anti-social behaviours of participants, lack of incentives, organizational costs and risks. Participation in social networks has long been studied as a social phenomenon according to different theories. This chapter discusses the basic aspects of social network analysis and some theories of participation in social networks, inspecting in particular the role of social capital. INTRODUCTION The most important technological trend of the last years has been the rise of social networking systems to social phenomena involving hundred of millions of people all around the world, attracting users from several social groups, regardless of age, gender, education, or nationality. Social networking systems blur the distinction between the private and working spheres, and users are known to use such systems both at home and on the work place both professionally and with recreative goals. Social networking systems can be equally used to organize a work meeting, a dinner with the colleagues or a birthday party with friends. For example, the chat systems that are embedded in social networking platforms are often the most practical way to contact a colleague to ask an urgent question, especially in technologically oriented companies. Moreover, several traditional information systems have been modified in order to include social aspects. Several organizations: (i) allow external social networking platforms to be used (e.g., Facebook was available for Microsoft and Apple employees before the general public launch); (ii) have created an internal social networking platform (DiMicco & Millen, 2007); or (iii) allow other social platforms for specific purposes (Millen et al., 2006). Currently, social networking platforms are mostly used without corporate blessing, maintaining their status as feral systems. According to DiMicco (2008), most users that use social networking platforms for work purposes are mostly interested in accumulating social capital, either for career advancement or to gather support for their own projects inside the company. In order to understand how a social network could be used to increase interactions, information sharing and benefits in teams and organizations, it is useful to refer to analytical models, based on both network topology and users' own interests. Social networks are typically studied using Social Network Analysis, a discipline that focuses on the structural and topological features of the network. Also, participation in such networks has long been studied as a social phenomenon according to different theories. Understanding the status of a social network, or the usage pattern of an online social networking platform, requires to study the system according to both static and dynamic models. Moreover, the theories of participation in social networks allow not only to study, but also to guide the dynamics of a given social network. The chapter is organized in the following way. First of all, we will describe the different kinds of virtual communities, social media technologies and applications which are available. Then, we will focus on models and theories of participation in social media, discussing also various models of information spreading and the issue of anti-social behaviours. We will then highlight the challenges faced by organizations and firms in adopting social media, either in internal or public way. Finally, we will provide some concluding remarks. TECHNOLOGIES FOR SOCIAL ONLINE COLLABORATION In general, Computer-Mediated Communication (CMC) is defined as any human communication that occurs through the use of two or more electronic devices (McQuail, 2005). Through CMC, users are able to create various kinds of virtual communities, i.e., networks of users whose connections mainly exist online. In the following paragraphs we discuss the features of the most typical kinds of virtual communities: (i) Virtual Organizations, (ii) Virtual Teams, and (iii) online Networks of Practice. Types of virtual communities Although there are several differences that clearly set the concepts apart, the trait d'union of the different kinds of virtual communities are (i) the lack of central authority, (ii) their temporary and impromptu nature, and (iii) the importance of reputation and trust as opposed to bureaucracy and law. According to the definition given by Mowshowitz (1994), a Virtual Organization is “a temporary network of autonomous organizations that cooperate based on complementary competencies and connect their information systems to those of their partners via networks aiming at developing, making, and distributing products in cooperation.” The term was then popularized by the Grid Computing community, referring to Virtual Organizations as “flexible, secure, coordinated resource sharing among dynamic collections of individuals, institutions, and resources” (Foster et al., 2001). The premise of Virtual Organizations is the technical availability of tools for effective collaboration among people located in different places, but their definition also emphasizes the possibility to share a large number of resources, including documents, data, knowledge and tools among interested people (Poggi & Tomaiuolo, 2010; Bergenti et al., 2005). Their importance is sustained by continuing trends in production and social forms, including the growing number of knowledge workers, the emergence of integrated industrial district and other aspects developing at an international level, like dynamic supply chains, just-in-time production, sub-contracting, delocalization, externalization, global logistics and mass migrations which collectively are usually named “globalization”. A Virtual Team, according to Powell et al. (2004), is a “group of geographically, organizationally and/or time dispersed workers brought together by information and telecommunication technologies to accomplish one or more organizational tasks.” Virtual Teams can represent organizational structures within the context of Virtual Organizations, but they can also come into existence in other situations, where independent people collaborate on a project, for example an open source software. An online Network of Practice (or interest) is a group of people who share a profession or a craft, whose main interactions occur through communication networks and tools, including forums and other discussion boards. The creation of the group typically occurs either: (i) in a spontaneous and natural way, because of a common interest of its members, or (ii) it can be tailored exclusively to actual practitioners, forged specifically with the goal of sharing and increasing their professional skills and knowledge. Requirements and features of Online Social Networks In OSNs there are at least three distinct functional elements: (i) profile management, (ii) social graph management and (iii) content production and discussion. In fact, by definition, a social network cannot lack social graph management and self-presentation, no matter how minimal. On the other hand, virtually no modern OSN lacks the content generation features. According to these three main functional areas, it is also possible to draw a classification of the OSNs in three main categories: (i) systems where the profile and social graph management is prevalent; (ii) systems where the content has a prominent role with respect to social networking activities and there are frequent interactions with people not closely related; and (iii) systems where the two aspects have roughly the same importance. The archetypal examples of the first category of systems are business-related and professional OSNs, like Linkedin. People pay a great deal of attention in creating their profile. In this type of systems there are usually various relationships among users, representing the variety of relationships that members may have in real life. Most users do not visit the site daily and do not add content to the system often (Skeels & Grudin, 2008). The second type includes blogging, micro-blogging and media sharing web sites, like Twitter. The “follow” relationships, which are typical for a system of this kind, are usually not symmetric. The focus is in information transmission; often the system does not support a proper profile and sometimes even the contacts may be hidden. Often weak semantic techniques such as Twitter hash-tags are used, in order to read content by subject instead than by author. Through collaborative tagging, the actors of the system may develop a sort of emergent semantics (Mika, 2007), possibly in the form of so-called “folksonomies”. Considering that tags usage is a heavy tailed power-law like distribution, i.e., most people actually uses very few tags, collaborative tagging usually produce a good classification of data (Halpin et al., 2007). The
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