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Q8-1 What Is a Social Media Information System (SMIS)?

#EVKXG 7UGTU OKNNKQPU 329
Facebook 1415

LinkedIn 347

U.S. population 319

Google+ 300

Instagram 300

Twitter 288

Figure 8-2 Pinterest 47
Number of Social Media
Active Users 0 200 400 600 800 1000 1200 1400 1600

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demographic groups. For example, about 70 percent of Pinterest users are female. On LinkedIn,
84 percent of users are 25 or older. 4
Organizations are SM users too. You may not think of an organization as a typical user, but
in many ways it is. Organizations create and manage SM accounts just like you do. It’s estimated
that 77 percent of Fortune 500 companies maintain active Twitter accounts, 70 percent have
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Facebook pages, and 69 percent have YouTube accounts. These companies hire staff to maintain
their SM presence, promote their products, build relationships, and manage their image.
Depending on how organizations want to use SM, they can be users, providers, or both. For
example, larger organizations are big enough to create and manage their own internal social media
platforms such as wikis, blogs, and discussion boards. In this case, the organization would be a
social media provider. We’ll look at the ways social media can be used within organizations later in
this chapter.

Communities

Forming communities is a natural human trait; anthropologists claim that the ability to form
them is responsible for the progress of the human race. In the past, however, communities were
based on family relationships or geographic location. Everyone in the village formed a community.
The key difference of SM communities is that they are formed based on mutual interests and tran-
scend familial, geographic, and organizational boundaries.
Because of this transcendence, most people belong to several, or even many, different user
communities. Google+ recognized this fact when it created user circles that enable users to allo-
cate their connections (people, using Google+ terminology) to one or more community groups.
Facebook and other SM application providers are adapting in similar ways.
To better understand the concept of communities, take a look at Figure 8-3. This figure shows
that, from the point of view of the SM site, Community A is a first-tier community. It consists of
users who have a direct relationship to that site. User 1, in turn, belongs to three communities:
A, B, and C (these could be, say, classmates, professional contacts, and friends). From the point
of view of the SM site, Communities B–E are second-tier communities because the relationships
in those communities are intermediated by first-tier users. The number of second- and third-tier
community members grows exponentially. If each community had, for example, 100 members,