Social Media for Online Collaboration in Firms and Organizations

Abstract

Participation in social networks has long been studied as a social phenomenon according to different theories. In particular, the notion of social capital highlights a person's benefit due to his relations with other persons, including family, colleagues, friends and generic contacts. It may be important both for the individuals that are able to accumulate large amounts, and for organizations. Nowadays, social networking systems bring many acquaintances online, both in the private and working spheres. Some systems are used both at home, for leisure goals, and on the work place, professionally. In the vast majority of cases, social networking platforms are still used without corporate blessing. However, several traditional information systems, such as CRMs and ERPs, have also been modified in order to include social aspects. This article shows the role of social capital in the participation in online social networking activities, in the various cases of Virtual Organizations, Virtual Teams, and online Networks of Practice. It describes the present situation, which is characterized by great promises and mixed initial results, and some possible prospects.

Complex task allocation for crowdsourcing in social network context

“…People are often connected by social networks [23,51,131]. Some recent studies [26,27] have shown that workers are also often connected through social networks.…”

“…The results are shown in Now we test the influence of skill number of tasks on the six types of performances of the five approaches. The scopes of skill number of tasks in the experiments are set as [5,10], [10][11][12][13][14][15], [15][16][17][18][19][20], [20][21][22][23][24][25]. The parameter of the relative importance factor α is set to 0.75.…”

“…Nowadays, with the significant development of social networks [22][23][24], the crowd of workers is often connected by social networks [25][26][27][28][29] and many related studies have harnessed the crowdsourcing power of social media [30,31]. For example, social networks such as Facebook and Twitter can also be considered as crowd providers [32].…”

“…Specifically, the crowdsourcing power of social networks has been used for disaster relief [30]. Generally, the advantages of social networks for crowdsourcing include at least the following parts: 1) workers within a social network are more inclined to cooperate with each other to execute a complex task [23]; 2) it is easier to find professional and helpful workers through social networks because real-world social networks include many professional groups [33], and many users of social networks undertake outsourced tasks not only for monetary return but also due to interest or willingness to share with their friends [27]; and 3) social networks can broadcast outsourced tasks more rapidly, thereby hastening the completion of tasks [22,30].…”

“…To address the above limitations of crowdsourcing based on artificial team formation, this thesis explores a new crowdsourcing paradigm that can utilize the natural organization form of people in social networks. In reality, people are often naturally organized into groups through social connections [23,33,60,61]. For example, many natural groups exist in which people are grouped according to gender, affiliations, research interests, or other common factors [22,62,63]; mobile device users within an area are grouped as a mobile cloud to provide pervasive crowdsourcing services [29].…”