Business Law Week 4 Assignment-Social Media

[Name of the Professor]

Business Law Week 4 Assignment- Social Media

Introduction

This assignment discusses the relationship between social media marketing through social networking websites, such as face book and Twitter, and consumer -business transactions over this medium, from a legal aspect. Moreover, the discussion section of this paper will also discuss the risks involved in conducting business over cyberspace through these respective social media outlets, as well as how best can these transactions or business activity can be regulated.

Discussion

Social Media & Social Networking Sites

Kaplan & Haenlein (2010) highlight the significant fact that social media, strictly speaking in terms of user generated content, was first initiated about two decades ago. However, social media that we know of today is very different compared to the one, which was introduced decades ago. One of the first social media site is believed to be 'Open Diary' by Susan and Bruce Abelson twenty years ago. This early social networking site brought together various online diary writers from around the world onto a single platform, where the users interacted as a single community. It was not until the advancement in technology and wide availability of the internet that the concept of social media reached soaring heights. This eventually broadened the horizon and led to the creation of social networking sites such as Face book in 2004 and MySpace in 2003.

Conversely, to describe social networking sites, Ellison & Boyd (2007) define them as web-based services that allow individuals to construct, a fully dedicated or semi, public profile on the internet, along with, being able to connect and share their activities with other web users. The nomenclature of how these networking sites are used greatly depends upon their structural design. For example, face book allows extensive and in-depth sharing and interaction amongst its users, when compared with twitter, where users are only able to express themselves and interact with others through a limited number of word characters. Nonetheless, a unique feature of these social networking sites is that, they allow their users to build a virtual profile of self and interact with their peers, family as well as complete strangers and share information with them. In a broader aspect, these sites allow individuals to network with their immediate as well as extended social circles, while at the same time contract new acquaintances with individuals whom they do not know, but come to know them through communicating over these sites.

With a passage of just few years, these social networking sites have greatly boomed, so much so that face book now boasts of over five hundred million active users on its network, which is a population larger then America itself. Businesses seeing predicting future viability and opportunity in these spheres have too incorporated social media as part of their core marketing activities. Moreover, it has become such a tremendous norm that now any potential or current consumer of a business expects and assumes all types of businesses to have a social networking ...