RESEARCH PROPOSAL

Cheng Cheong, Anne Sandareka Keshinie Fernando, Aditya Misra Hridaya Nanyang Technological University Singapore 637718 Email: {CCHENG003; SANDAREK001; ADITYA005}@ntu.edu.sg

RESEARCH TOPIC: Usage of social media as a formal information sharing platform in IT

1. INTRODUCTION/BACKGROUND OF RESEARCH Internet has open up many different possibilities and changes many ways of how we do things nowadays. One of the growing trends is the use of social media platform. Individual uses it to connect with friends and business uses it to connect with their customers. We see many people are joining this bandwagon of social media, so we shall see what is so attractive about the use of social media platform. Social media basically encompasses online social interaction meant for various purposes such as blogging, social media sites, video sharing and more (Kahar, Yamimi, Bunari, & Habil, 2012). Focusing on social media sites, this is a platform that most of the people use it to connect with friends and share digital information with each other. On business level, they use it to interact with their customer, brand marketing and business related activity. There is no age limit to use this platform and it is a simple to use within the platform. Facebook and Twitter are two examples of very popular social media sites used among all individuals and business locally. Individual usually shared personal information such as day-to-day stories through social media site with their direct connected friends. With the growth on this usage, people starts to use social media site as an alternative channel to disseminate important information to the rest of the world. Taking example of the recent haze issue in Singapore during July 2013 period, we can see most of the people take on the discussion through social media platform (Saad, 04 July 2013). With the growth of smartphone usage, there are now no limitations to location for users to be connected with each other through social media. We can easily share information even while on the move. As information grows on these platforms, we see potential values of such information. Search engine has always been one of the traditional tools that we would use for information seeking. However with the potential growth of social media platform and people are contributing so much information into this platform it is possible that this platform could be a potential key to be an alternative platform for information seeking. Trend of social media usage has now moved to professional level. Organizations are trying to use specialized social media platforms inside the workplaces for different objectives. Social media sites inside organizations have been built up to help improve the communication within organizations and increase the bond between coworkers (Steinfield, DiMicco, Ellison, & Lampe, 2009). 2. STATEMENT OF THE PROBLEM AND JUSTIFICATION With the growing trend of social media usage, many companies join in this trend and move into this circles of social media. Even for small business they are also joining this bandwagon and according to (Kahar et al., 2012) the top 3 reason for usage of social media is to create networking chances for the business, strengthening networking with the customer and to build relationship with friends.

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Table 1: Reasons for using social media Although we see that companies are willing to leverage the use of social media platform in their business to connect with their existing customer or even potential customer. However we do notice that there are also many companies also restricting the full use social media platform within their organization, especially for social media platform. The main concern from the company would be on the topic of security (Lee & Warren, 2010) which includes the following Trust, Accuracy and Authenticity Privacy and Confidentiality

Trust, Accuracy and Authenticity The main concern here is the lack of security mechanism that is available on the social media platform to be able to detect threats. In a virtual environment, it is very easy for one individual to proclaim as another identity. There are minimal resources for us to ensure the real identity of each individual in the Internet world. Virus, phishing attacks and different social engineering fraud could be used to lure legitimate users to provide their credential information and resulting their account being compromise by attacker. When their account is being compromised, the data and information that is linked within their profile would be at risk of being tempted. Privacy and Confidentiality Companies could face high risk of leakage of confidential information if their employees uses social media platform to discuss commercial-in-confidence information. Especially discussion made in social media sites can be easily shared across with different parties as such platforms are designed for circulating information publicly and efficiently. Although there are security factors that most of the companies would considered before embracing themselves to jump into this social media wave. There are also other companies believing that social media would be the next upcoming technology that business should integrate themselves with. IBM is one of the companies that embrace the use of social media within organization and also outside of the organization. Internally the employees are allowed to use the internal Microblogging services to share information internally and the feedback received from the employee was positive about the using of such technology within the organization. Social media has many potential features built-in to support for data sharing and data searching such as hashtag feature (Ehrlich & Shami, 2010). Hashtag usually used in the form of # followed by the words or statement can be easily searchable within the social media platform. Information can be easily directed to a particular person by using the @ symbol in the post will allows that particular users to get informed of the information via his or her RSS feeds. Facebook has share post feature

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while Twitter has retweet features which basically works the same for allowing users to copy the exact same post shared by someone else. We believe that there are high potential for organization to embrace the use of social media platform more within their organization particularly on the focus of using it for information seeking by the user. Our objective in this research is try to understand whether can social media platform be an alternative tool for information seeking within an organization targeting active social media users. The specific objectives of this research are: 1. To find out whether most of the companies allows their employee to use social media platform within the organization 2. To find out how much time does user spent on social media platform during office hour 3. To find out how professional use social media for formal information sharing 4. To investigate the advantages and disadvantages of using social media as formal information sharing platform 3. SCOPE OF THE RESEARCH This study aims to focus on IT savvy personnel from organization on the use of social media tools and investigate the possibility of using social media platform as an alternative tool for information seeking for IT related topics inside an organization. Among these students, we will be analyzing mainly those who is working more towards IT related field and through our surveys we will study how current IT sector use social media for formal work and if users feels that they can rely on social media as a platform for sharing and also an alternative channel for technical information seeking, whether they see potential of having social media a platform for such collaboration use within an organization environment. 4. IMPLICATIONS/BENEFIT In this study discover potential use of social media for formal information sharing identifying factors that are constraining professionals from using social media as a information sharing platform

5. PROPOSED METHODOLOGY Data Collection We intend to collect data from a targeted group of people about their opinions and behaviors. Surveys would not only allow us to collect a broad range of data (e.g.: attitudes, opinions, beliefs, values etc.) but would also enable us to collect it from a number of respondents on numerous questions. Interviews shall also form a part of this extensive research and would be immensely useful to obtain detailed information about personal feelings and perceptions. Along with the clarification of ambiguities, these interviews can be a useful means of following up on the incomplete survey answers. Data Analysis We will conduct a qualitative study through survey feedback and from these information that we collected we will be able to understand how professionals todays are using social media and also allowing us to know the potential of using social media as an alternative tool for information finding. From the analysis result, we will have a better understanding of the current usage of social media. Based on the study, we can better suggest how professionals can leverage the potential use of social media for information sharing.

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6. PROJECT SCHEDULES

Task Name CI Proposal Draft Project Proposal Revision and Approval of CI Draft Proposal Submission of CI Proposal Survey Prepare questionnaire and methods Get Supervisor's feedback on questions Revise questionnaire Conduct survey/interviews Analyse collected data Meeting with supervisor Final Report Draft Initial Report Present Initial Report to Supervisor Gather Feedback CI report initial submission Revise Report Submit Final Report

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7. REFERENCES Ehrlich, K., & Shami, N. S. (2010). Microblogging Inside and Outside the Workplace. Paper presented at the ICWSM. Kahar, R., Yamimi, F., Bunari, G., & Habil, H. (2012). Trusting the Social Media in Small Business. Procedia-Social and Behavioral Sciences, 66, 564-570. Lee, C. Y., & Warren, M. (2010). Micro-blogging in the workplace. Saad, I. (04 July 2013). Role of Singapore's social media in recent haze problem. doi: http://www.channelnewsasia.com/news/singapore/role-of-singapore-s/734418.html Steinfield, C., DiMicco, J. M., Ellison, N. B., & Lampe, C. (2009). Bowling online: social media and social capital within the organization. Paper presented at the Proceedings of the fourth international conference on Communities and technologies.

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