Legal and Ethical Factors Constraining The Use Of Social Media In Business

Social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter are becoming a more and more used way an integral part of the way people communicate. These sites are increasingly used by members of the legal profession both in their personal and business capacities.

Current Use Of Social Media In Business Practice:

Because social media sites have been growing more and more popular, employers are taking advantage and using these sites in their hiring processes. Companies and organizations looking to hire applicants have seen an increasing value in utilizing social media to check the background of individuals.

A 2008 survey of US Human Resources departments found 84% of employers utilized online search engines to find applicants, an increase from 77% back in 2006

There is no law in place that restricts employers from considering information on an individual's social network profiles when making a recruitment decision.

Legal:
There is a large concern of people who believe that employers may not hire someone due to their physical appearance (race etc.) or beliefs from information they find on social media websites. This is argued that the employers can breach the Sex Discrimination act without being actually caught for it.

Ethical:
Through public profiles, employers may see protected class information or sensitive and private activities that are not job-relevant but that may influence the employer's view of a candidate, which brings in both legal and ethical questions

Dangers Of Social Media

In this blog I will discuss the Dangers of Social Media

Oversharing:
The thing with people in social media is that people like to share what they do, sometimes they can overshare. This could lead to problems such as a robbery from a property of yours or even cases of social engineering.

Cyber bullying:
One of the most common threats to people in social media. Cyber Bullying is the act of bullying someone online rather than in person. The victims tend to be children, teenagers and young adults. This can involve something such as a hateful comment or message sent to someone. The easiest way to avoid this is for the victim to simply block the bully on all social media platforms. At the same time it is still bullying and also a criminal offense.

Grooming:
Grooming is a large problem in social media as it is used to stalk vulnerable young victims. The groomers often use fake profiles to befriend the children and arrange a meet up with them. This is a very illegal act and is a long-term jailable offense.

Hacking:
If someone is somehow able to hack one of your social media accounts, they are able to use all of your personal information that you have already provided to the site. This can be used as a form of identity theft/fraud.

Characteristics of Social Media

This blog input will talk about the characteristics of social media.

Web Address
Firstly, a social media site will give the user their own web address, an ID that is used to locate the user's page. This is good for people looking for social presence whether it be a band, a business or even just someone looking for publicity.

Web Space
The social media provider will often provide the user with the ability to save and share content such as media, blogs etc with other users.

Connecting With People and Friends
This is one of the key points of social media, actually being able to be social. Many social media platforms allow people to use instant messaging services, "tag" friends in media, play games and more.

Creating Your Profiles To Your Own Preference
In most social media websites you have the ability to build and create your own profile from scratch, although the users can only work with what the social media provider allows.

Concepts of social presence, social capital, social production and social intelligence

Concepts of social presence, social capital, social production and social intelligence

Social Presence:

Social Presence is simply a way to look at the awareness of someone on Social Media. It is what many people and businesses use to get their name out there.
Companies can hire any local social media presence or marketing agency to create a complete plan for their social media presence.
 

Social Capital:

Social Capital is the networks of relationships among people who live and work in a particular society, enabling that society to function effectively.

The term can refer to:

1. Resources e.g. How many people/which people, spaces they have available to use. 2. The relationships between these resources 3. The way the relationships actually work together 

Social Production:

Social Production is an international term used to convey the process and product in social media. 

Social Intelligence:

Social Intelligence is simply a rough measurement of people’s ability to get along well with others and getting them to cooperate with you whether on social media or out with it.

How enterprises can use social media to promote their products or services.

Businesses have taken to social media in hopes to promote their products and gain a wider client base. It is as close to free advertising as you can get. Whereas it’d cost a company $35,000 to get a single ad on a prime time slot a company could instead offer to give away a $15,000 car to a lucky winner. They still reach similar amount of eyes but they’ve fractionalised the cost. Sponsoring social media personalities is yet another effective way of building an audience, this is most noticeable in “YouTube” where people can have huge amounts of people following them and their content/opinions.

Having a social media prescience can help many smaller businesses with specialised products like customised clothing or specific art supplies. Similarly small businesses can use the location serviced often built into social media sites to bring in customers from the area like cafes and restaurants. 

The Unique Characteristics of Social Media Sites.

From the get go one will notice that many different social media sites exist and they all operate differently. Some are used for Microblogging (posting a sentence or two a time) or some are just like a chatroom. We shall look at the differences between sites like Facebook, Tumblr, Twitter and Pinterest.

Facebook

Facebook is a social media site. Users have to register a profile either using their own name or some kind of persona they’ve invented. Up registering users can seek out friends either by contacting them in real life and asking them to add them as a friends or just track them down on the site (fun fact! If you’re looking for someone called John Smith there is no doubt thousands of them existing on the site, so if you type John Smith Ayr (or wherever he comes from) you can likely find him a lot easier! Another feature of facebook is that there can be pages for things like Games or TV shows, these pages (if they are owned officially) can be good ways to gain reliable information about your hobbies.

Twitter

Twitter is a “Microblogging” social media site where users are limited to only 140 characters per post. Twitter is currently in the top 3 social media sites in the world. Mostly used by people wishing for a less serious form of communication users often follow a few of their favourite celebrities and a few other friends if they happen to use the site. Users can “Retweet” posts they find funny or just to show off the statement. Twitter also used Hashtags which cause interaction between the websites vast community. People could state something like “I watched the match last night, wow #football” and whoever searched the hashtag #football would theoretically be able to see the post.

Tumblr

Tumblr, like Twitter, is a Microblogging site but it doesn’t have the same restrictions as Twitter, users can post much more than 140 characters. Users have a dashboard where they can view posts from blogs they follow. Running a blog on the site can be beneficial with bloggers being able to queue posts and earn money from advertising should they become so popular. 

Evolution of Social Media

Social Media has become a normal part of peoples lives daily now, but this has been evolving since early stages in the late 1970s from the original days of newsgroups, listservs and the first chatrooms. Social media has changed the way we interact and even the way we live to a certain degree.

From the Primitive Era of Social Media came the Medieval Era(1988 – 1999) of Social Media where more people joined in the fun of it. More and more ideas got brought in at this point including the first “create program” and “add friends” ideas.

After these came the most impressive development stage of Social Media: the Golden Age of Social Media(2001 – Present) in the past 15 years technology has rapidly developed from Blogs, to Friend meeting sites, to video uploading/viewing websites literally billions of people use these sites every second. With the internet reaching its Third BILLION user in 2014 there is no wonder people are inspired to create new and amazing social media websites and applications.

Image Source: http://www.adweek.com/

Jamie McJannet

Dangers of Social media to Individuals and Businesses

There are many dangers which show themselves on social media:

Cyberbullying:

Sometimes people just can’t leave well enough alone. As an extension of regular bullying Cyberbullying exists only online and mostly in social media. Most victims are children and young adults. They general consensus is to tell the child just to block said bully but getting hit in the face by one stone is just as bad, even to see just one hateful message still hurts a child’s feelings deeply. It’s a true issue that needs to be addressed or at least an effort being made to have an environment where a child is safe from bullies or.

Grooming:

With social media came the realisation of many parents’ worst fears. An environment where anyone can be anything it becomes unsurprising that predators would stalk their pray in such a biome. It has led to much criticism of sites like Facebook as it isn’t hard to pose as a child, befriend another and try to organise a meeting. Despite the severe jail time involved Grooming doesn’t seem to show much sign of stopping any time soon.

Oversharing

While to most users people who overshare are a mild annoyance but occasionally it becomes dangerous. Like posting that you are going on holiday for two whole weeks! Where your house could be robbed by someone who is your ‘friend’ on a social media profile.

IP Theft

On social media businesses especially smaller ones can fall victim to having their content stolen by another. Take for example the 2010 Mobile and Browser game CandySwipe which was plagiarised by King Digital. 

Rights and responsibilities in social media

What are my rights on social media platforms? At work users are often prohibited from visiting social media sites during work hours. Most often turn a blind eye on break times but some do not! Always remember to read the small print on your respective contracts. While it is not illegal for an employer to ask for your username and password you can always flat out say you don’t have one. Whilst general lewdness and egregious statements go unpunished you still can be held liable for your statements online and in social media; people have been imprisoned for hate crimes due to their social media postings.

What are my Responsibilities?  On social media you are often thought to have responsibilities and while you don’t have to obey them-social media is practically anonymous; it isn’t as if you’re easy to be found and held liable- being nice is generally the good thing to do. While trolling might be ‘funny’ if it isn’t happening to you just remember that its causing a real person real stress which is something that you’d –hopefully- try to prevent if you saw it in real life. The general rule of trolling is that the more impassioned someone is about a topic the funnier it is to annoy them about it so always remember to be modest about your hobbies. Never reply if someone does target you, even if what they said was the nastiest thing you’ve ever seen someone say, you’re only doing what they want. Blocking them without a word is probably the only way to defeat a troll, while they’ll never admit they’ve been defeated; they have.

Online and in social media always try to stay on topic. If you see a conversation about cats don’t bother commenting in the thread about your Xbox…no one cares, the conversation wasn’t about Xboxes. Spamming is something else to prevent while you may think it’s funny to copy massive walls of text and post twenty statuses about them others won’t see the funny side and you’ll find your friend list decreasing very quickly. Be responsible about the content of your postings, while you and your little sicko friends might enjoy laughing at pictures of dead people on 4Chan or whatever; your family and loose acquaintances on Facebook won’t.  

Contemporary Developments of Social Media

These days’ social media is a huge business. About 74% of all internet users use social media in some

form. The medium is such a lucrative business that more and more people are making a career just from social media; be it YouTubers like PewDiePie and Markiplier or Bloggers popular Facebook pages.

Blogs pretty much earn most of the revenue in social media by utilising the most powerful tool any hack with a keyboard can: Clickbait. With the rise of easy to use technology social media too become easy to access.

Businesses:

 Businesses often use Social media these days to help spread the attention of their products and to raise their household name status. Campaigns and trends can often come from corporations like the ‘WestJet Christmas Miracle’ (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zIEIvi2MuEk  ) and TD’s #TDThanksYou ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bUkN7g_bEAI ). By doing wonderful things for people in the days of social media companies can come across as caring about the people which is a valuable edge in marketing.

Social media is now a valuable asset to companies. The main bonus of social media is that it’s a cheap way to advertise, a campaign here and there. Social media has a huge demographic and any business without a presence is one in the loss. Pragmatically business campaigns aren’t immune from failure, many have fallen under criticism, too many to list.

               

Crime:

While the foolishness of oversharing can lead someone to get robbed the crime fighters have also come to use social media as a way to combat the common criminal, exposure for missing people, wanted posters and appeals for information about cases and crimes. This can help greatly as social media has a huge audience.

Social media is prevalent on most of our lives and it is being used more and more to reach out to us. 

Potential Dangers of Social Media

Cyber Bullying

Cyber Bullying is a major issue when it comes to social media and is most likely the most common. Cyber bullying affects almost everyone that uses social media and most people have likely encountered cyber bullying at some point whether it be someone threatening them, pretending to be them or harassing them. Here is a graph of the amount of students from a school in the US that have been cyber bullied.

Identity Theft

In 2012 more than 12 million people became victims of identity theft and fraud and a total of $21 billion was lost on that year alone. Social media sites like Facebook and Twitter are attacked online and user info like usernames, passwords and email addresses are stolen and used to steal your identity. In some cases criminals can just look at people’s profiles and see the information they’ve posted on there for people to see, information like date of birth, hometown, pet names and interests and hobbies and with this information someone could easily steal your identity.

Invasion of Privacy

Many people don’t set proper privacy settings on their profiles which leaves their profiles open for anyone to view. This is an issue because someone could post something along the lines of “I’m going on holiday tomorrow for 2 weeks” and criminals will see this and take advantage of this and most likely burgle your home. It’s not just criminal that exploit this employers and big companies can use it to look up your previous history if you are attempting to get a job in that company.

Kevin Crawford

The Evolution of Social Media

Social Media has been in the works since the late 70s starting with things like newsgroups and early chat rooms. Social Media started to become more popular in 2001 with the introduction of more chat applications and one of the earliest blog platforms Livejournal.

After this there was a large amount of innovation in the industry such as the creation of Wikipedia, and Friendster, Myspace and Facebook following that in 2004 and then twitter in 2006. Social Media popularity on mobile devices has spiked in recent years with 36% of mobile users having a messaging app installed on their smart phone in the year 2015 and almost half (49%) of people ages between 18 - 29 use their smart phone for instant messaging.

Social media has become the social norm now days and almost everyone is using it, including large companies, young kids and even older generations. Even augmented reality is increasing in popularity with the release of tech like Google Glass, Oculus Rift, HTC Vive and Google Cardboard.

Social media has even changed the way businesses advertise, instead of spending thousands on a TV advert or a bill board advert they can spend far less money on an advertisement spot on a social media site and get a lot more exposure this way as well and it also benefits smaller companies that don't have as much money and it can really get them off the ground and make it big in the world. But it also has it's down sides with sites being over saturated with advertisements and sometimes even taking up more space on the site than the actual content on the website. 

Kevin Crawford

Societal Issues Raised by Social Media

With the increase in popularity of social media, issues have arose and become more popular because of this. Here are some of the issues raised by social media.

Online Harassment

Online Harassment is the most common issue with social media, because people can be anonymous online they can send threats, bully people and stalk people. This can be a difficult subject to handle and there isn’t many ways of stopping it apart from setting you profile to private and blocking people.

Intellectual Property theft

This is a major issue online and happens more than people may think. A lot of people use the internet as a way of posting their art, videos and video games but in doing this it leaves them open to people copying their work and passing it off as their own. For example someone could download a video on youtube and upload it as their own and then file a copyright strike against the original owner and have their video removed from youtube and that person can then reap the benefits.

Impersonation

Online anyone can be anyone and this is used to exploit people and steal their information. For example if you are subscribed to something and someone acquires your email they will email you requesting more of your information using a similar email address as the group/company that are in charge of whatever it is you are subscribed to. With this information they could sell it and gain a profit which would result in more of your information being stolen.

Kevin Crawford

How Enterprises Can Use Social Media

Enterprises can use social media in multiple ways that can be beneficial for them.

Promoting themselves

The most popular and most likely main reason an enterprises uses social media is to promote themselves. Promoting themselves can lead to an increase in sales and popularity.

Hosting Competitions/Give Away

Hosting a competition or a give away can be very beneficial for an enterprise as it can increase their popularity and gain positive recognition and it can improve brand loyalty and it can increase their inbound traffic.

Decrease Their Marketing Costs

Using a free platform like most social media sites like Facebook or Twitter instead of paying for an advert in a magazine or on TV they can post update onto Twitter or Facebook. An enterprise could also pay to have an advert post onto everyone’s feeds for a lot cheaper than the other options.

Receive Instant Feedback

An enterprise can check on social media whenever they make a change to their business or hold a promotional event to check people’s reactions towards the change or promotional event and make changes based on this if needed.

Kevin Crawford

Characteristics of Social Media

For a website to be categorized as a social media web site it should contain some of these characteristics.

Web Space

The web site should provide users with free web space to upload content such as their photos, videos, blogs, groups and hobbies/info.

Web Address

Giving the users a unique web address allows their page to become their web identity so they can share this web address with others and promote themselves if they are using it as a business page, are in a band, are an independent artists or are using it as a portfolio.

Building Profiles

The ability to create your own profile and being able to customize your profile in some way I a popular choice for social media as it allows the user to customize their profile to suit whatever purpose the page was create for like being able to add your business logo or add your own art to your webpage.

Connecting with friends

The ability to connect with friends through social media is a must otherwise it won’t be very social. Being able to connect with your friends through social media will allow you to plan events, play games and share photos/videos.

Uploading Content in Real Time

Being able to upload in real time allows the user to keep their profile up to date and anyone who follows that person up to date as well.

Enable Conversations

Being able to have conversations with friends, groups and strangers (if they would like that option) is also a must have characteristic of social media and keeps people coming back to check on their group conversations and also allows the users to be able to plan events easier.

Time Stamps

Having time stamps on posts is more important than most people might think because it allows users to be able to follow posts a lot easier and see when a certain update was posted.

Kevin Crawford