Communications and Media the use of social media Essay

What SouthWest Airlines (SWA) has done is to consolidate customers and fans for the better performance of its operation in clear(p) of competition it is facing. This is a clear case where neighborly media is being used as a channel that supports community building, customer collaboration and sharing ideas and grocery trends that propel the performance of a company. This strategy should be adopted in an ideal education situation so that university systems could look for ways of spicy and need learners to be more proactive. Still on SWA, the Company actively engaged fans on Facebook finished dribbleing different items and argumentative debates just to gather opinions on what customers expect from them. This is what Dani and Singer (2008) term as discrete approach to merchandising and feasibility study on what passel expect (p. 192). American University of Sharjah needs to meld a number of fond media tools into the learning process to reflect the success SWA has enjoyed within the shortest period of time it has been on business.Beginning with how SWA has integrated Facebook within its platform, it is grand to note that what American University of Sharjah should strive to achieve is to have social net geting. To contextualize this point, when using Facebook to engage customers, the case (Southern Airlines by Adam Saffer) reports that by circuit card a characterisation from Air Zealand there were 58 comments and 95 likes. These comments according to the author helped the Company strategize on the best approaches to deal with the demands of its client. Contextualizing this case, explore by the Higher Education interrogation Institute (HERI 2007) has shown that at least(prenominal) 87 percent of students in universities have social media accounts and as such, Facebook account for about 90 percent. This statistics shows that social networking websites have permit integral parts of students live at American University of Sharjah. It is from this perspec tive that the university should try as much as possible to engage students in decision do process by posting agendas and policies for debate. That is, facebook should be integrated as part of learning process. From the case, it has been noted that SWA communicated with Facebook fans in response to the questions and issues they were having. When there was a query or a problem from their fans, they could respond to the question on time and publicly. This is particularly to the issue that Lala Palelei asked on November 2nd 2009. It is from this approach that it is recommended for American University of Sharjah to actively engage with students with Facebook. As a matter of fact, Alexander Astin proposed a developmental theory that sought to engage with learners (Geyer et al. 2009). In his theory, he proposed that social interaction with learners help them formulate psychologically and physically. Just like what SWA did, responding to the issues students are asking should be evidence- based. That is, answers should be well researched so that engagement includes efforts students invest in their educational activities and such by trial and error connected to the objectives of the university.Just like SWA, American University of Sharjah is active on Twitter. It is important to note that adoption of official Twitter account is one factor, making it surmount empirical understanding of the use of such technology and the available theories regarding why it (the Twitter account) may alter a number of organizational process is another. It is from this musing that the university should muddle twitter account serve the purpose SWAs twitter account is doing. The case reads, of the social tools, SWA has found Twitter to be its primary subject matter of interacting with its public. There are inherent reasons as to why the Company finds Twitter to be a source of interaction. Citing a case, it is reported that Jessica Turner had an interesting post concerning newest service location which was geared towards attracting debates on Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR). This post attracted attention of its followers to an extent that the SWA managed to understand dynamics of the market through what is termed as two-way communication between SWA and its publics. Basically, this is the recommendation the University needsa two-way communication between students, teaching staff and the public. This recommendation is evidence-based. Scholars such as Daly (2010) have studied the relationship between social practices and new technologies and found greater utility in the concept of affordance and unity because by positively engaging others through social media forums explain why organizations using same technology are likely to engage in disparate or similar work practices and communication. On 14th December 2014 the University through its official Facebook account affix the 12th NGN10 Competition where engineering students from the university were invited to c ontri alonee on the best way to make the lightest tower crane. While this approach is similar to what Christi Day did about his Twitter post on Grab your bag. Its on it is recommended that for effective interaction, the university should integrate marketing campaign when making such posts so that a conversation is generated between interested parties and students.Flickr and You Tube are other two social media SWA has used to profit on the needs of its customers and fans. On Flickr the information provided is that organizations such as the University can use social media to counter unrealistic claims and kick backts aimed at tarnishing its image. This is in regard to complain made by Scooteriscracy. However, to maintain transparency and avoid circumstances as the one SWA found itself in, the line between personal business and professional posting should be distinct. It is recommended that the University should be careful in its posting. Nuts about Southwest as the name of SWAs You Tube should be used as a benchmark in helping American University of Sharjah note that the use of social media also encompasses permitting every employer to self-publish as long as such publication conforms to specialized regulations of the institution. It is apparent that the manner in which the University uses You Tube does not allow people, including students to communicate or share their views and opinions across faculties or organizational boundaries. To conceptualize this recommendation, Brzozowski et al. (2009) conducted a research on the benefits of institutional engagements of leaners on social media. After interviewing 425 undergraduate students from the Midwestern institution, is was found that when learners are allowed to share, post or participate in education forums posted through social media there is a positive correlation between student engagement in the affairs of school and success of the school in policy drafting and implementation. In fact it is through this r ecommendation that SWA has managed to achieve its objectivegreat customer service (being ranked as the airline with the least cases of complaints per passenger since it started monitoring the data in 1987).It is important to mention, just like Fuller and Valacich (2008) does that the routine of social media in American University of Sharjah should be about providing meta-knowledge. That is, making the institution understand the type of people in its environ and what they may do so that good relationships and rapport is maintained. Just like what SWA is doing through blogging, the University could let students and employees create profiles pages on different social media where such pages have corporate directories information, photos as well as summary of content that individuals have contributed. It is from such initiatives that people will learn more about the interests, backgrounds and activities of students, workers. It is apparent that what SWA has succeeded in is creativity wh ich as not only placed it as one of the fasted growing companies but also made it become effective. This will be achieved if the University allows participation by all in social media activities. Finally, American University of Sharjah has a reputation to keep and for the usage of social media, maintenance of confidentiality, transparency and respect to the property should note be overshadowed by the quest to adopt the recommendation provided.ReferencesBrzo zowski, M., Sandholm, T., & Hogg, T. (2009). Effects of feedback and peer pressure oncontributions to enterprise social media. Proceedings of the 2009 International Conference on Supporting Group Work (pp. 6170). New York ACM. doi10.1145/1531674.1531684Daly, E. M., Geyer, W., & Millen, D. R. (2010). The network effects of recommending socialconnections. Proceedings of the Fourth Conference on Recommender Systems (pp. 301304). New York ACM. doi10.1145/1864708.1864772Dani s, C., & Singer, D. (2008). A wiki instance in the enterpris e Opportunities, concerns andreality. Proceedings of the 2008 Conference on Computer back up Cooperative Work (pp. 495504). New York ACM. doi0.1145/1460563.1460642Fuller, R. M., & Valacich, J. S. (2008). Media, tasks, and communication processes A theory ofmedia synchronicity. MIS Quarterly, 32, 575600.Geyer, W., Millen, D. R., Dugan, C., & Brownholtz, B. (2009). People sensemaking andrelationship building on an enterprise social networking site. Proceedings of the forty-second Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences. Los Alamitos, CA IEEE Computer Society Press. doi10.1109/HICSS.2009.343Higher Education Research Institute (2007) College freshmen and online social networking sites.Available at http//www.gseis.ucla.edu/heri/PDFs/pubs/briefs/brief- 091107SocialNetworking.pdf (last accessed 17th December 2014).Source document