EXPLORING THE BUSINESS VALUE OF SOFT SKILLS IN SOCIAL NETWORKS – A CONCEPTUAL EVALUATION APPROACH BASED ON CONSENSUS SCORING

Since the emergence of the Internet era in the early 1990s, many evaluation systems for the rating of various entities emerged. For example, at amazon.com people are able to rate books and transactions or to leave comments for other users. Although there is a wide variety of rating and evaluation mechanisms on the Internet, there are only few mechanisms for the evaluation of user skills in social networks. For many users online profiles displaying other people’s skills are increasingly important, e. g., when contracting freelancers or finding candidates for a job opening. However, current profiles found in social networks offer either unstructured free text that is hard to handle efficiently or simplistic rating schemes that do not convey meaningful information. In addition, it is unclear how trustworthy the information on the profile is. Hence, in this paper, we provide a novel approach for the evaluation of soft skills on the Internet. Our approach is based on a consensus measurement approach in social network services based on social graphs as a formalization of personal relationships among users

Users\u27 Trust Building Processes During Their Initial Connecting Behavior in Social Networks: Behavioral and Neural Evidence

Social networking sites (SNSs) are a ubiquitous phenomenon in today’s society and their economic and social impact is high. However, despite the fact that many SNSs provide increasingly more system features to boost social networking, there is also an increasing concern about trust. Users’ trust is important for a long-term oriented and successful SNS, based on a lively connecting behavior in SNSs. Nevertheless, so far only a limited number of studies investigated users’ trust perceptions that are an important antecedent of connecting behavior in SNSs. We conducted a behavioral study, as well as a brain imaging experiment, to explore trustworthiness judgments in SNSs in order to better understand how pictures and textual information influence users’ initial connecting behavior. Preliminary results of this research-in-progress paper show that both pictures and textual information have strong influence on trustworthiness judgments, and these judgments are processed differently in the users’ brains

Towards a Conceptual Model for Trustworthy Skills Profiles in Online Social Networks ∗

Abstract For many users online profiles displaying other people’s skills are increasingly important, e. g., when contracting freelancers or finding candidates for a job opening. However, current profiles found in information systems offer either unstructured free text that is hard to handle efficiently or simplistic rating schemes that do not convey meaningful information. In addition, it is unclear how trustworthy the information on the profile is. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to online skills profiles based on users ’ confirmations and the SkillRank credibility ranking and describe its prototype implementation. As spadework, we set forth six basic requirements for online skill evaluations which should generally be reflected in corresponding IS design.