Introduction
Nowadays there is a lot of information about relatively newly emerged terms such as Web 2.o, Social media, social publishing, User Generated Content (UGC) and others. When for the first time I encountered these terms, I felt a deep confusion. In order to make an effort to figure out systematically what they are and for what purpose they can be used in a particular organization this assignment has to be done.
Organization of my choice is the Karaganda State Medical University (KSMU), where I have been working as a software engineer before I came to Malaysia.
Organization background
KSMU (www.kgmu.kz) is one of the oldest universities in the Republic of Kazakhstan. According to the results of the National Accreditation Centre’s rating in 2008, KSMU has occupied the 8th place among 60 Kazakhstan leading universities and now it is the leading medical school in the Republic. KSMU is the first medical university in Kazakhstan which has passed successfully in 2005, the certification in accordance with the requirements of all kinds of management quality of International Standard IOS 9001-2000 certification authority NQA.
Around 5000 students from all regions of Kazakhstan, CIS countries, and foreign countries study in five faculties. The education is conducted on three languages - Kazakh, Russian and English.
What is Social Media and Social Publishing?
According to Kaplan & Haenlein (2010) social media is “a group of Internet-based applications that build on the ideological and technological foundations of Web 2.0, and that allow the creation and exchange of User Generated Content (UGC).” It is meaning that Web 2.0 is kind of a technical platform on which Social Media was developed. And UGC is like a result of all ways in which people use Social media.
In order to understand the species of Social media, Web 2.0 tools and this field in general in a systematic way several theories were established. Among them are such theories as Social presence or Media richness, and Self-presentation or Self-disclosure, which relate to Media research and Social processes fields respectively.
Briefly, as Kaplan & Haenlein (2010) reviewed the Social presence theory states that the behavior of people who are taking part in communication can be as much influenced by each others as more social presence is taken place. For example, on-line chat allows you more to be socially presented than e-mail conversation. The person you are chatting with is waiting for your reply right now and a time can be considered as a factor which affecting your behavior. But the e-mail conversation can last a week - one e-mail per day. You have a lot of time to think what to write and in a which style. There is the same story with video chat, like Skype conversation where you can see the face of your interlocutor allows you to be more socially presented rather than Instant Messaging.
The theory of Media richness is very similar to the theory of social presence but it is just formulated from the different angle. It states that as much information social media allows to transfer in a certain period of time as more effective the ability to resolve uncertainty. So we can derived that as more rich Social Media as easier to be presented socially.
Self-presentation and Self-disclosure theories are also very resembled. Roughly we can say that they state that people, wherever they are communicating either on-line chat, e-mail conversation or face-to-face dialog, they always want to control impressions other people form of them. So we can say that different social media can be classified by the level of opportunity to present ourselves.
Thus, considering all of aforementioned theories Kaplan & Haenlein (2010) offered to classify all social media as follow in Table 1:
Table 1. Classification of Social Media considering existing theories
| | Social presence/Media richness | |||
| Low | Medium | High | ||
| Self presentation/ Self-disclosure | High | Blogs | Social networking sites (e.g., Facebook, My Space, Vkontakte, Moi Mir) | Virtual social worlds (e.g., Second Life) |
| Low | Collaborative projects (e.g. , Wikipedia, Delicious) | Content Communities (e.g., You Tube, Flickr, Slideshare) | Virtual game worlds (e.g., World of Warcraft) | |
According to the definition which was taken from Wikipedia - Publishing is “the process of production and dissemination of literature or information—the activity of making information available to the general public”. So, in context of this assignment I propose the following definition of Social Publishing.
Social publishing – is the process of making information available to the general public through the group of Internet-based applications that build on the ideological and technological foundations of Web 2.0, and that allow the creation and exchange of User Generated Content.
What is the power of the social publishing?
Salcido (2011) identified such advantages of social media as low cost, unlimited access, simplicity, global reach, contact building, flexibility, and measurability, which can be considered as a clue of the power of Social publishing.
Mostly, all of applications are free or low cost. There is no anybody who is responsible for developing of Web 2.0. It is a common term which emerged by itself naturally; hence there is nobody who is going to charge you. In most cases they can be easily technically mastered by a regular staff, no need to have any outstanding skills in IT. It is accessible from any place as long as you or your users have Internet connection. Wide varieties of them allow you to be flexible in a way you want to use them. Nowadays most people are using it. The fact, that the generation Z, for sure, most part of generation Y, and significant part of generation X is on the web, allows wide slice of population to be reached easily in terms of geography and time.
What are the opportunities of the social publishing in KSMU?
Social media can be a powerful tool in Marketing of any organization. Mahmood, K., & Richardson, J., V. (2011) identified that all libraries of Association of research libraries (ARL) in USA were found to be using various tools of Web 2.0. Blogs, microblogs, RSS, instant messaging, social networking sites, mashups, podcasts, and vodcasts were widely adopted, while wikis, photo sharing, presentation sharing, virtual worlds, customized webpage and vertical search engines were used less. Romero, N., L. (2011) states that social media use in organization allows to expand the scope of the library’s work beyond its normal outreach; to open a new channel of communication and of services; to foster and facilitate the participation of users in the daily activities of the library; to rely on a marketing tool: The use of social media affects mainly the visibility and image of the organization, the improvement of the service itself and user experience.
Let’s take a look at the application of social media in KSMU. There was no exactly blog in KSMU, but there was a virtual reception of vice-chancellor. It was based on blog platform where any user has chance to post a question. It was very good effort, because all questions were processed by authority people, and no need to go there or call. Many questions from other regions were answered. The similar service was described by Joint (2009) where they provided improved reference service, 24/7 virtual reference service. But I don’t agree with the term “virtual” which the author used. I would rather call it electronic than virtual, as well as I don’t agree with the title of the KSMU service “virtual”.
Microblogs or twitter account was not used by KSMU. But it could be used as an announcer of upcoming events, regular announcements, or last news. I see the power of Microblogs or Twitter account in its mobility. It is easy to use, you just post the news or announce and the users who follow you will receive it on their mobile devices.
Really Simple Syndication or RSS can be used also as a news aggregator but on user’s PCs.
Instant Messaging or chat box on the site is a very good tool to provide reference service for example in libraries. Chatting solve several problems like users’ anxiety, meaning when users are shy to ask something because of some reasons, chat provides them opportunity to be kind of incognito, also librarian can serve 5 users at the same time, one more advantage there is no need to do a manual report, in some chat applications it is counted automatically how many chat transaction were done, and at what time. But in case with KSMU, I think there is no need to use Chat box on the web-site, but we were using corporate chat within organization. It saved our time regarding some simple questions. But the drawback was there as well, sometimes we were just chatting about private things, what was a distraction from the job.
Social networking sites are definitely high productive marketing tool which can benefit to any organization. In fact, nowadays almost each organization has gotten its own social network account. This type of social media allows to present organization sufficiently due to its such features as opportunity to post text, to upload photo and video, to share links and to be followed by its friends and to follow them as well. For KSMU it would be good to have a Facebook account to enter an international level, to be visible overseas. But for internal marketing they would rather use Russian server based social networks such as www.vkontakte.ru and www.my.mail.ru, because most people in former Soviet Union area are using them.
Mashups was not used on the KSMU web-site, yet it is a good way to integrate external application such as You Tube video channel, Flicker album, or a Google map to show the way how to get to the university. Visitors can browse your video or photo library without leaving your site Mahbob Yusof (2011).
Wikis were not used there, but as Kaplan and Haenlein (2010) noticed, the main idea underlying collaborative projects is that the joint effort of many actors leads to a better outcome than any actor could achieve individually. So far, I don’t have any idea of wiki use in university web activity.
What are the challenges of the social publishing in KSMU?
Bart (2011) indexed the following potential risks of social media - freedom of speech, privacy, accessibility, copyrights, intellectual property, and cyber-bullying. Joint (2009) discussed the challenge of authentification and intellectual property.
The wrong online marketing strategy could put organization a social disadvantage and may even damage reputation, i.e, when you make a mistake offline, a few will know but when you make a mistake in front of hundreds or thousands of you online audience, most of them will know, Beirut (2010)! Hence, it needs to have professional staff to handle it. When I was telling about simplicity I meant technical ease to master the software, but the content should be considered carefully and smartly. The top management of KSMU did not perceive all Web 2.0 things seriously. I think, they thought it is kind of entertainment which can distract employees from the main job, so they didn’t provide a special position for this kind of work. But it should be done, because “using social media for marketing could be more time consuming than companies expect” Beirut (2010).
Another challenge is that the “social media can have a negative influence on worker productivity. Employees may waste valuable time using social media channels such as Facebook and Twitter” Beirut (2010).
And the main issue which is most discussed is absence of information control. If organization provides transparency and wants to get a feedback from users, it is also can be easily criticized by them, what can damage the reputation. The easy access to information and easy way to publish whatever users want rapidly reduces the control of information, which is available on the Internet about the organization. But yet it could be an opportunity to improve yourself and fix the problems.
References
Bart, M. (2011).Understanding the Potential Pitfalls of Social Media. Trends in Higher education. Retrieved 10, October, 2011, from http://www.facultyfocus.com/articles/trends-in-higher-education/understanding-the-potential-pitfalls-of-social-media/.
Beirut. (2010). 10 Must-know advantages & disadvantages of social media. Retrieved on 18, October, 2011, from http://blog.thoughtpick.com/2010/11/10-must-know-advantages-disadvantages-of-social-media.html
Joint, N. (2009). The Web 2.0 challenge to libraries. Library Review, 58 (3), 167-175.
Kaplan, A.M., & Haenlein, M. (2010). Users of the world, unite! The challenges and opportunities of Social Media. Business Horizons, 53, 59-68.
Mahbob Yusof. (2011, September 30). Defining social media, social web & web 2.0 for libraries. PowerPoint lecture presented in Faculty of Computer science and Information Technology, ML lab. Univeristy of Malaya Campus.
Mahmood, K., & Richardson, J., V. (2011). Adoption of Web 2.0 in US academic libraries: a survey of ARL library websites. Program: electronic library and information systems, 45 (4), 365-375.
Publishing (2011, October 8). Retrieved 10, October, 2011, from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Publishing.
Romero, N., L. (2011). ROI. Measuring the social media return on investment in a library. The Bottom Line: Managing Library Finances, 24 (2), 145-151.
Salcido, M. (2011). Advantages of using social media - advantages of media. Retrieved on 18, October, 2011, from http://www.organicseoconsultant.com/advantages-of-using-social-media/.
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