Page 309 - Electronic Commerce

Chapter 6

Internal Social Networking
A growing number of organizations have built internal Web sites that provide
opportunities for online social networking among their employees. These sites also include
important information for employees. These sites run on the intranets you learned about
in Chapter 2. Organizations have saved significant amounts of money by replacing the
printing and distribution of paper memos, newsletters, and other correspondence with a
Web site. Internal social networking pages also provide easy access to employee
handbooks, newsletters, and employee benefits information.
284 An internal social networking Web site can become a good way of fostering working
relationships among employees who are dispersed over a wide geographic area. Many
service companies offer a discussion area on their internal social networks that allow
service technicians to post questions that are then answered by more experienced
technicians who might work anywhere in the company. Some companies create private
pages on sites such as Facebook and use those as internal social networking tools. This
saves the company the cost of creating the social networking site internally.
Many companies are extending the reach of their internal social networks by enabling
employees who are traveling, meeting with customers or suppliers, or telecommuting to
connect using their mobile devices.
The use of mobile technology is becoming an important part of almost every social
networking business strategy as people use their mobile phones to do everything from
take photos they will post on Facebook to send tweets to their followers on Twitter. In the
next section, you will learn more about how companies can combine mobile technologies
with social networking to create new online business opportunities.

MOBILE COMMERCE
Mobile phones today are used for much more than making voice calls. They are used to
send and receive text messages, communicate over the Internet, and access satellite
geographic positioning services.
Virtually all mobile phones sold today include short messaging service (SMS), which
allows mobile phone users to send short text messages to each other. Using SMS, usually
called texting, became a common way to communicate in many countries (often, sending
a text message was less expensive than a voice call), but it was much slower to catch on
in the United States.
Internet-capable mobile phones first appeared in 1999, but the tiny screens made use
of Web browsers difficult. With today’s larger phones and their high-resolution screens,
mobile phones are ideal devices for connecting to the Internet. Two developments
coincided in the United States in 2008 that made mobile phones truly viable Web
browsing devices. First, high-speed mobile telephone networks grew dramatically in
availability, and second, manufacturers began offering a wide variety of smartphones that
included a Web browser and a screen large enough to make it usable, an operating
system, and the ability to run applications on that operating system. In this section, you
will learn how this confluence of technologies made doing business online using mobile
devices, called mobile commerce (m-commerce), an everyday occurrence throughout the
world.

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