Social Networking

In today's fast moving world social media plays an important role in many ways, and Social Media is bigger what we normally view it as. Social Media can influence many decisions made by individuals and corporates.

There are lots of upsides and downsides to it. Lets talk about all the downsides first; social media is Internet based network, where you can share your life to your friends and family. Whenever you post anything on Internet, it doesn't stay personal after, and it is the simple rule. Your personal information is floating around somewhere in the cyber space, and someone will have access to it somehow. That being said, there are many instances where people upload very personal things on Internet, and the items were leaked on Internet. For example, whenever we see big celebrities’ personal pictures being leaked on Internet is just a simple example. 

Since everything is now computerized and everything is on cloud, it has become possible for talented hackers to hack some of the biggest companies in the world such as JP Morgan Chase, Sony, Target, and many other companies who recently who became victims of such crime. When big companies like this get hacked, it puts personal information of individuals at risk who do business with them, or employed by them. Question is what is the connection of these companies being hacked have to do with social media? Lets take example of Sony; they made a movie “The Interview”, which created a big hype in social media, and people were eager to go to that movie because it was suppose to be really funny. Apparently on the other side of the world, it was an act of war in eyes of North Korean leader and his followers. Sony took a big blow in the data breach, which really put Sony’s employee’s personal information at risk.

Social Media is not always harmful, it could also be very helpful to many big corporations such as Target, Wal-Mart, EBay, Amazon, Google, Facebook, and list can go on forever. These companies have learned a way to increase their profits by learning about people’s habits, what they do, what they like, what are they looking for, and everything about and individual so they can target the consumer in a way they can detect the needs for the customer before the customer’s family members know it themselves. The best example this is when Target found out a teen girl was pregnant before her father did. You can Google to story of that teen on Google, and see it for yourself how target found out such thing.  I know some of you out there are probably saying, dude this item belongs in the downsides, not upside. But since most of us here are learning about social media, I will put this in good side, just because maybe one day we can all learn about making money way target make’s its money. With help of social media, it is much easy to detect needs of people, and what they talk to people about. Remember those ads popping up on your computer because you typed something on your Facebook messenger? Yes, perfect example again.

1. http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2013-01-15/news/chi-facebook-01152013_1_ceo-mark-zuckerberg-social-network-long-term-money-making-prospects

2. http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1435498

3. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/02/technology/02traffic.html?ref=business