Study of the On-line Social Networks impact

The emergence of on-line social networking sites is producing an important impact on our behavior in the Internet, in just a few years social networks and blogging sites have managed to capture two-thirds of world-wide internet visits and almost 10% of total internet time (Nielsen, 2009). Nevertheless, consequences extend beyond the internet use pattern alteration, producing a long lasting transformation in social relationships and their structural elements: identity, status and power (Fraser & Dutta, 2008). The first one, identity, refers to the differences between the real identity and the virtual. Our real identity is unique and it is tied with our real envionment (family, job, the country where we live and so on), whereas in cyberspace one can be multiple; this means that a person can have more than one profile and it is not necessarily related to the real-world. The second one, status, means the position compared with the social environment. The status can be completely different between the real-world and the virtual, in the real-world the status is determined by function of the culture, some of the norms that can classify you in your status are: age, education, salary, gender, etc. In the virtual-world democratization status occurs (Fraser & Dutta, 2008), in other words, the norms which determine your status is not link with your culture, so in a virtual environment each person can get the status that he or she wants, because it is not related to traditional attributes. The last one, power, refers to the influence that a person or an organitzation can have over others. That is to say, the more influence that a person has the more power. In the real world a lot of power relationships can be found, for example: centralized organizations, parents in a family, the referee in a football match, etc. However, in cyberspace a diffusion of power is produced (Fraser & Dutta, 2008), because power is spread over cyberspace. Subsequently, there are differences of behavior between the real world and cyberspace. This leads Innova Institute (BES La Salle) to foster research activities in this field to study how this is going to impact on companies and organizations. Organizations suchs as Ikea, Munich, Starbucks, MIT and La Salle are already being involved in transforming their relationships with customers, partners and stakeholders. Were you aware of this Ikea campaign in the social networks? IKEA - Facebook showroom What do you think about this type of ads? References:

• Fraser, M. & Dutta, S. 2008, Throwing sheep in the Boardroom. How Online Social Networking Will Transform Your Life, Work and World, 1st Ed, Wiley, Chichester, England.
• Nielsen 2009, Global Faces and Networked Places, viewed 19 October 2009, http://blog.nielsen.com/nielsenwire/wp-content/uploads/2009/03/nielsen_globalfaces_mar09.pdf.