How Do Online Social Networks Drive Internal Communication and Improve Employee Engagement?

The definition of a social network is taking traditional or in person networking activities online. It focuses on facilitating the building of social networks or social relations among people who, for example, share interests, activities, backgrounds, or real-life connections. Given the popularity of social network sites, it is obvious that more and more companies are interested in using them to enhance company’s strategy. Many large organizations had been looking for ways to extract business values from social technologies, and some of them had already run their own social network site on their own servers, what we will refer to as an internal social network. Our research, focusing on looking at the practices of real companies’ internal social network, may reveal some insights or give some inspirations

Locative Media and Sociability:Using Location-Based Social Networks to Coordinate Everyday Life

Foursquare was a mobile social networking application that enabled people to share location with friends in the form of “check-ins.” The visualization of surrounding known social connections as well as unknown others has the potential to impact how people coordinate social encounters and forge new social ties. While many studies have explored mobile phones and sociability, there is a lack of empirical research examining location-based social network’s (LSBNs) from a sociability perspective. Drawing on a dataset of original qualitative research with a range of Foursquare users, the paper examines the application in the context of social coordination and sociability in three ways. First, the paper explores if Foursquare is used to organize certain social encounters, and if so, why. Second, the paper examines the visualization of surrounding social connections and whether this leads to “serendipitous encounters.” Lastly, the paper examines whether the use of Foursquare can produce new social relationships

Asynchronous Remote Medical Consultation for Ghana

Computer-mediated communication systems can be used to bridge the gap between doctors in underserved regions with local shortages of medical expertise and medical specialists worldwide. To this end, we describe the design of a prototype remote consultation system intended to provide the social, institutional and infrastructural context for sustained, self-organizing growth of a globally-distributed Ghanaian medical community. The design is grounded in an iterative design process that included two rounds of extended design fieldwork throughout Ghana and draws on three key design principles (social networks as a framework on which to build incentives within a self-organizing network; optional and incremental integration with existing referral mechanisms; and a weakly-connected, distributed architecture that allows for a highly interactive, responsive system despite failures in connectivity). We discuss initial experiences from an ongoing trial deployment in southern Ghana.Comment: 10 page

Security and online social networks

In the last few years we have witnessed a sustained rise in the popularity of online Social Network Sites (SNSs) such as Twitter, Facebook, Myspace, Flickr, LinkedIn, FriendFeed, Google Friend Con- nect, Yahoo! Groups, etc., which are some of the most visited websites worldwide. However, since they are are easy to use and the users are often not aware of the nature of the access of their profiles, they often reveal information which should be kept away from the public eyes. As a result, these social sites may originate security related threats for their members. This paper highlights the benefits of safe use of SNSs and emphasizes the most important threats to members of SNSs. Moreover, we will show the main factors behind these threats. Finally we present policy and technical recommendations in order to improve security without compromising the benefits of information sharing through SNSs.IV Workshop Arquitectura, Redes y Sistemas Operativos (WARSO)Red de Universidades con Carreras en Informática (RedUNCI

Encounters on the social web: Everyday life and emotions online

Encounters also happen online nowadays and, yes, they are still difficult to describe, even though it is sometimes easier to observe them-and obtain data about them- than in the past. The internet is crucially 'shaping the interactions people have with one another' (Johns 2010: 499). With the recent explosion and popularity of Web 2.0 services and the social web, such as Facebook (FB), Twitter, and various other types of social media, internet users now have at their disposal an unprecedented collection of tools to interact with others. These modes of online sociability allow users to pursue social encounters with variable levels of involvement, attention, and activity (Papacharissi and Mendelson 2010). For many of us it is now difficult to imagine our social relationships without access to the internet. The social web plays an important role in relationships among internet users (Boyd 2006), with the expression, management and experience of emotions being key to the maintenance of these relationships