In August I finished my bachelor thesis called “The alignment of web 2.0 and social media with business strategy”. I wrote it as part of my Business Administration study with the Information Management department. In this research I focused on using IT and organization literature to fill the academic gaps on social media literature. I researched the definitions of social media and web 2.0 and how these can be used by organizations. The main focus was to find an answer to how organizations can align their use of social media (or social software) with their business strategy. To in the end realize more effective investments.

Here is the first part of a serie of blogposts where I present the the research and findings of my Social Media & Business thesis. I hope you’ll comment and share your views on the material. In the end I will make a pdf available and we might even have updated sections based on comments/discussions!

Introduction

We are at the point of new developments in IT and business in the form of social software and social media applications. Many organizations and researchers have begun experimenting with the internal use of social software in the workplace (Brzozowski et al. 2009). The use of these technologies is quickly maturing and moving to enterprise-level projects and platforms and the social software marketplace is now starting to attract large vendors such as Google, IBM and Microsoft (Gartner research, 2008).

The goal of this research is to develop a model that allows web 2.0 and social media to be aligned with organization strategy. Reason for this is that aligning the business and IT strategies in organizations helps realizing more effective investments (Henderson et al.1993). These theories are analyzed in this paper and come together in the model that will be presented at the end.

Problem statement

Corporations trying to adopt and use web 2.0 and social media applications in their business, raises the question of how organizations can use these in extend to their strategies.

• How should web 2.0 and social media be approached and how can organizations align these web 2.0 and social media developments with their organization strategy?

To answer this question the following sub questions need to be answered:

• What is web 2.0 and social media and what are good definitions?
• How can social media be approached and used by organizations?
• How can social media be aligned with the business strategy of organizations?

Web 2.0 and social media theory

To get a clear definition of what web 2.0 and social media is and how organizations can use these, first web 2.0 will be researched. At the end of this chapter a clear definition of web 2.0 and social media is given and how they are connected.

Historical perspective of web 2.0, the dot-com bubble

After the burst of the dot-com bubble in 2001, it became clear that organizations that survived the crash had certain web business characteristics in common that were later identified as web2.0. (O’Reilly, 2007)

O’Reilly’s definition of web2.0 in 2006 is the following: “The business revolution in the computer industry caused by the move to the internet as a platform and an attempt to understand the rules for success on that new platform” (Valacich & Schneider, 2009). This indicates a shift in thinking about internet as a new platform. Web 2.0 is not only a collection of technologies but also a way of approaching these new technology applications to create successful business model.

The following list was created by O’Reilly when analyzing which applications are thought of as web2.0.

From an internet business perspective key to web 2.0 is: “The embracing of harnessing collective intelligence”. The new technologies and use of the web to allow a collective intelligence to be formed and created online. Businesses who succeed in embracing this can use it to their advantage.

According to O’Reilly (2007) internet businesses need to embrace this as a core competence and understand that: “Network effects from user contributions are the key to market dominance in the web 2.0 era”. This stresses even more the need for companies -especially internet business related- to understand this shift towards web 2.0 and the changes that it has brought.

Definition of web 2.0

While O’Reilly’s paper mainly focuses on the changes after the dot-com bubble for internet businesses it helped identify the general business aspect of web 2.0 as the ‘harnessing of collective intelligence’. It is hard to have a clear definition of a concept like web 2.0, because it doesn’t have clear boundaries (O’Reilly, 2007) and web 2.0 cannot be reduced to one principle (Hoegg et al. 2006).

Web 2.0 technologies can be used to develop different web 2.0 services and platforms. These web 2.0 services include: Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts, Social Networks and Social Bookmarking. Technologies like AJAX, API’s and RSS have made these new web 2.0 services possible and feasible ( Hoegg et al. 2006) .

Anderson(2007) presents a list of principles that he sees as key ideas that help define web 2.0. These key principles are in line with O’Reilly’s ‘collective intelligence’ definition and add to the definition of web 2.0 not only being a collection of technologies.

All these key principles offer new possibilities for communication, collaboration and business. The key idea of openness refers to the social philosophy of web 2.0 and data on an epic scale refers to the amounts of data we produce electronically. Some argue that maximizing the collective intelligence of the participants is fundamental to web 2.0 (Hoegg et al.2006). Web 2.0 isn’t just only about technological aspects, but also about social aspects like collective intelligence, communication and collaboration.

Definition of social media

From a sociological perspective, social media can be described as “collective goods produced through computer-mediated collective action”. An example is Wikipedia, where the collective goods are articles, and the collective action is the co-editing process of article writing (Smith et al. 2008). These goods are produced and shared on web 2.0 computer-mediated platforms.

Social media platforms offer valuable high quality content that is embedded in socially constructed repositories and the structure of these content collections is different from the web 1.0 structure (Smith et al. 2008). Social media uses the possibilities of the web 2.0 structure to enable the social aspect of collaboration, communication, media sharing and more.

Conclusion: Technology, services and platform aspects of web 2.0

Web 2.0 is not just a collection of technologies, but is a broader concept where technologies, services and platforms come together (Hoegg et al. 2006). To get a clear view of what web 2.0 and social media is and how these affect organizations a distinction is made between the different aspects of web 2.0.

Web 2.0 is a combination of technologies, services and platforms. For organizations to better understand web 2.0 and social media we make a distinction between three aspects of web 2.0. First we have web 2.0 technologies like AJAX, API’s and RSS. These enable web 2.0 services like Blogs, Wikis and Podcasts. These services come together on web 2.0 platforms like Facebook (social networks), Google, Blogger and Twitter. These platforms also allow new applications to be created on top of them like crowd sourcing, viral marketing campaigns and real-time information. On this platform aspect of web 2.0 is where social networks are found and where Social Media operates.

I argue that Social media can be identified in web 2.0 services and platforms and thus overlaps with the application aspect of web 2.0. Defining social media as: collective goods produced through computer-mediated action on web 2.0 services and platforms, gives a better indication on which level of web 2.0 social media operates. This has led to the following distinction between web 2.0 aspects and gives a clear overview of both web 2.0 and social media definitions, that can help identify where the business use of both can be found.

I argue that the business use of web 2.0 can be found in social media. Social media is where the application and platforms that are interesting for the business use of web 2.0 come together and where strategic decisions are made. These platforms offer opportunities for organizations like crowd sourcing, collecting data, marketing and many more. Making use of the collective intelligence aspect of web 2.0 and using social media platforms to collect and share this collective intelligence among the users. In this paper social media is identified as the services and platforms that are interesting for business use and where we the focus will lay on in this paper.

Part 2 follows soon!

Related posts:

1. Impact of Social Media and Web 2.0 on Organizations – Thesis Part 2
2. The alignment of web 2.0 and social media with business strategy – Thesis Pdf
3. Business Strategy and Social Media (IT) alignment – Thesis part 3