Role of Social Media in Socioeconomic Development: Case of Facebook

To study the role of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) on countries’ socioeconomic development, the paper investigates the case of Facebook penetration on improving their standing as measured via GNI per capita PPP (Gross National Income per capita based on purchasing power parity). We use four macro factors categories (political, economic, demographic, and technological) in addition to Facebook penetration per capita in order to measure the potential influence of various factors on the socioeconomic level of countries. While the analyses of ICT effect on development has been the focus of many papers in the past, the specific analysis of social media is scarce. Compared to previous studies investigating social media role, we use a large dataset covering all classes of countries and examine holistically many types of determinants using different models. In addition, we distinguish our paper using the economic classification of countries according to the World Bank. Our study indicates that Facebook penetration has a significant positive role on the socioeconomic level of countries, but such role varies depending on the countries’ classification level. Besides, there is a decreasing marginal effect showing the importance for policy makers to assess the complex dynamic behind the characteristic of each country

Misconceptions and Realities of the 2011 Tunisian Election

In response to the 2011 Tunisian elections and the uncertainty surrounding Tunisia's future, we offer an empirical explanation of the election's results using socioeconomic and demographic variables. We aggregate many political analyses to describe the main parties and give insights into their strengths and weaknesses. We also examine common misconceptions advanced during the elections. Finally, we include a proposed electoral map that could be used by politicians to plan their future political strategie

Social media framework for businesses

Social media is gaining popularity and many studies are investigating the topic by providing contradictory conclusions about its effectiveness. To scrutinize this incongruence, we first differentiate social media from other communication tools and describe its challenges. Next, based on an extensive literature review collecting research papers from 2004 to 2016, we propose a structural framework explaining the role of managerial, individual, and contextual variables that affect the social media value chain. We find that social media has a controversial effect on businesses’ objectives depending on the context of studies. We also find that social media’s objectives could be classified into five distinct levels: brand, financial, competitive, management and customer objectives. The paper has value for researchers proposing an exhaustive framework as a theoretical basis for future research, and has value for practitioners to plan more strategically the flow of their social media chain. Various directions for future research are proposed such as investigating the hierarchical order of influence on the social media objectives and performing comparative analysis to examine the effect of social media across industries for each objective level

Product Distribution and Coordination Strategies in a Multi-Channel Context

Channel coordination plays a strategically important role in a multi-channel context. In this study, we focus on the strategic roles played by product distribution and coordinative structure with profit sharing in the multi-channel context. We use an analytical model to show that the brand differentiation is not a dominant distribution strategy to coordinate the channel conflict and improve channel performance; the manufacturer can sell identical brands through its online and traditional channels and actively employ a cooperative structure with profit coordination to maximize the entire distribution of channel profit and create a win-win channel strategy for each channel member. In addition, we also investigate the impact of an online channel on the whole distribution channel performance under the different structures. Our results show that coordinative market structure provides competitive advantages for the manufacturer to open an online channel, particularly for these manufacturers whose products are weakly compatible with the online marketing. Based on our results, we derive optimal market strategies for the multi-channel manufacturer and retailer