Yunus Abdullah - Use of Social Media by Businesses: A New opportunity For Consulting Services by Accounting Firms

In the last 10 years, social media has been restructuring business policies and practices creating new business models. These models are shaping the internal and external aspects of businesses, improving efficiency, and hopefully yielding higher profits while reducing costs. At the same time, social media is being implemented in such internal operations as employee training, recruiting, communication within organizations, and building business loyalty. Businesses are becoming more dependent on social media, making social media an inevitable expectation of effective business models. The millennial are the new generation of adults who are taking over the business world. This generation of young adults grew up using such social media networks as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Google +, and LinkedIn. To sustain good relationship with their clients (millennial), businesses must meet people\u27s expectation of the practices and plan their policies accordingly. This paper will examine how the use of social media by businesses is leading to a new service being offered by accounting firms, social media consulting. Experts in internal controls, accounting firms, will have the resources and capacity to offer services in social media consulting. The large accounting firms such as Deloitte, KPMG, Ernst &Young, and PWC have already entered social media consulting market.https://epublications.marquette.edu/mcnair_2013/1006/thumbnail.jp

Information is not a Virus, and Other Consequences of Human Cognitive Limits

The many decisions people make about what to pay attention to online shape the spread of information in online social networks. Due to the constraints of available time and cognitive resources, the ease of discovery strongly impacts how people allocate their attention to social media content. As a consequence, the position of information in an individual's social feed, as well as explicit social signals about its popularity, determine whether it will be seen, and the likelihood that it will be shared with followers. Accounting for these cognitive limits simplifies mechanics of information diffusion in online social networks and explains puzzling empirical observations: (i) information generally fails to spread in social media and (ii) highly connected people are less likely to re-share information. Studies of information diffusion on different social media platforms reviewed here suggest that the interplay between human cognitive limits and network structure differentiates the spread of information from other social contagions, such as the spread of a virus through a population.Comment: accepted for publication in Future Interne

An Integrated Framework for Competitive Multi-channel Marketing of Multi-featured Products

For any company, multiple channels are available for reaching a population in order to market its products. Some of the most well-known channels are (a) mass media advertisement, (b) recommendations using social advertisement, and (c) viral marketing using social networks. The company would want to maximize its reach while also accounting for simultaneous marketing of competing products, where the product marketings may not be independent. In this direction, we propose and analyze a multi-featured generalization of the classical linear threshold model. We hence develop a framework for integrating the considered marketing channels into the social network, and an approach for allocating budget among these channels

Accounting, accountability, social media and big data: Revolution or hype?

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to outline an agenda for researching the relationship between technology-enabled networks â such as social media and big data â and the accounting function. In doing so, it links the contents of an unfolding area research with the papers published in this special issue of Accounting, Auditing and Accountability Journal. Design/methodology/approach: The paper surveys the existing literature, which is still in its infancy, and proposes ways in which to frame early and future research. The intention is not to offer a comprehensive review, but to stimulate and conversation. Findings: The authors review several existing studies exploring technology-enabled networks and highlight some of the key aspects featuring social media and big data, before offering a classification of existing research efforts, as well as opportunities for future research. Three areas of investigation are identified: new performance indicators based on social media and big data; governance of social media and big data information resources; and, finally, social media and big dataâs alteration of information and decision-making processes. Originality/value: The authors are currently experiencing a technological revolution that will fundamentally change the way in which organisations, as well as individuals, operate. It is claimed that many knowledge-based jobs are being automated, as well as others transformed with, for example, data scientists ready to replace even the most qualified accountants. But, of course, similar claims have been made before and therefore, as academics, the authors are called upon to explore the impact of these technology-enabled networks further. This paper contributes by starting a debate and speculating on the possible research agendas ahead

Handling Human Hacking: Creating a Comprehensive Defensive Strategy Against Modern Social Engineering

Social engineering is one of the most devastating threats to any company or business. Rather than relying upon technical flaws in order to break into computer networks, social engineers utilize a suave personality in order to deceive individuals through clever conversation. These devious conversations frequently provide the attacker with sufficient information to compromise the company’s computer network. Unlike common technical attacks, social engineering attacks cannot be prevented by security tools and software. Instead of attacking a network directly, a social engineer exploits human psychology in order to coerce the victim to inadvertently divulge sensitive information. Further complicating the issue, the rise in popularity of social media has vastly increased the arsenal of information available to the social engineer to utilize when targeting individuals. Ultimately, this paper will describe the danger posed by social engineering attacks before detailing a comprehensive strategy to defend against the threat, accounting specifically for the dangers posed by social media and psychology

A Techno-Social Approach for Achieving Online Readership Popularity

Understanding what drives readership popularity in online interactive media has important implications to individual practitioners and net-enabled organizations. For instance, it helps generate a success “formula” for designing potentially popular websites in the increasingly competitive online world. So far, research in this area lacks a unified approach in guiding the design of online interactive media as well as in predicting their successful adoption and use, from both technological and social orientations. Drawing upon the media success literature and related social cognition theories, we establish a techno-social model for achieving online readership popularity, accounting for the impacts of technology-dependent and media-embedded characteristics. The proposed model and hypotheses will be tested by a content analysis of 100+ very popular weblogs and survey of 2000+ active weblog readers. This research carries significant value for sustaining community- and firm-based user networks that have been recognized as an important source of social and knowledge capitals

FIRE: Agent of Change

Self immolation protests have been used over the course of history for expressions of personal protest and religious persecution, but more recent ones have been focused on political protest and been chained to revolution as in Tunisia. Even in the face of constant harassment and repression, Mohamed Bouazizi was a compassionate man. He chose to react with violence on no one but himself in response to the harassment he had experienced all his life. Having used every channel of complaint available to him and receiving no respite from his woes, Mohamed Bouazizi self immolated. Social networks are not a new thing, but the addition of social media to social networks is, and the incredibly visual image of his burning as well as video of violent reaction from security forces on the very first protests by his friends and family were uploaded to Twitter and Facebook and told the story in an almost minute by minute accounting of the beginnings of a revolution. Without the social media component there would not have been a Tunisian revolution for there would have been no Twitter to upload a photo to, nowhere to share the picture that was taken of Bouazizi’s self immolation. Like no other revolution before it social media was the tipping point, and the peaceful Tunisian uprising that began as a small protest in the city of Sidi Bouzid had begun

Impact of Social Network on Customer Acquisition in the Banking Industry in Nigeria

This article reports the result from the study of the impact of social network on customer acquisition in the Nigeria banking sector. This hypothesis study adopted a quantitative paradigm and correlational investigation to establish the association between the dimensions of social networks and customer acquisition. A 53 item questionnaire was used to elicit responses from 320 respondents conveniently sampled on the basis of those who indicated interest to participate in the study. Both descriptive and inferential statistics were used to analyze the data from the survey. The study established the association between social network and customer acquisition with the Facebook accounting to the highest social network media that the banks have used to acquire and interact with their customers. The study recommends after establishing the current use of social network for customer acquisition in the Nigeria bank, for improvement