Social Media’s Positive Business Impact

Posted in Education, Technology, Web Services on Nov 9th, 2009 | View Comments

The final research paper for my COSK1221 (Argument and Research) class at Robert Morris University is worth 30% of my final grade.  I chose to argue that businesses that choose to accept and participate in this new form of interaction, social media has a positive impact in the areas of customer communication and connection, customer support, and monetization of brand evangelists.

I’d like to thank all of the companies that spoke with me, including Webnotes, Zeo, Comcast, Verizon, SurpassHosting, Discover, The PNC Financial Services Group, and Robert Morris Univeristy.  You can find all of the interviews here.  The Verizon and Zeo interviews have the most substance – they were hour long phone interviews.

You can download the final paper here.

Please leave a comment on this post letting me know your thoughts!  If you’d like permission to print the paper or copy anything out of it, please contact me using the contact page.

  • http://www.brandonpaton.com/ Brandon Paton

    Nice job Mike.

    The Net Promoter Score reminded me of what was written in (although I'm not positive) The Tipping Point by Malcom Gladwell. They showed different types of people a list of 100 last names and asked them to circle the last names of people who they know, or have known in the past. I guess the concept was that the more people you know, the more influential you are.

    Regardless, there are a few companies that I can think of that would benefit by reading your paper. A lot of people just don't comprehend the scale of the Internet and the impacts (good or bad) that it can have on a business (online or off). It's amazing to think how different things were 10 years ago, and how things can change so fast in such a short period of time. The success of many companies will be based on their ability to adapt to those changes.

  • http://mikeboylan.com Mike Boylan

    Thanks, Brandon! I appreciate the response! I did read The Tipping Point, but I think that concept is a little bit different. The Net Promoter Score doesn't necessarily rank your popularity on the web as a whole, but rather per each individual company. For example, you could be a promoter for Apple, but a detractor for Microsoft. Does that make sense? Check out the Wikipedia page. It's very insightful.

  • http://www.brandonpaton.com/ Brandon Paton

    Nice job Mike.

    The Net Promoter Score reminded me of what was written in (although I'm not positive) The Tipping Point by Malcom Gladwell. They showed different types of people a list of 100 last names and asked them to circle the last names of people who they know, or have known in the past. I guess the concept was that the more people you know, the more influential you are.

    Regardless, there are a few companies that I can think of that would benefit by reading your paper. A lot of people just don't comprehend the scale of the Internet and the impacts (good or bad) that it can have on a business (online or off). It's amazing to think how different things were 10 years ago, and how things can change so fast in such a short period of time. The success of many companies will be based on their ability to adapt to those changes.

  • http://mikeboylan.com Mike Boylan

    Thanks, Brandon! I appreciate the response! I did read The Tipping Point, but I think that concept is a little bit different. The Net Promoter Score doesn't necessarily rank your popularity on the web as a whole, but rather per each individual company. For example, you could be a promoter for Apple, but a detractor for Microsoft. Does that make sense? Check out the Wikipedia page. It's very insightful.

  • http://mikeboylan.com/2009/10/interview-6-with-surpass-hosting/ Interview 6 With Surpass Hosting | MikeBoylan.com

    [...] readers of Kayla’s blog!  Be sure to check out the final paper here in which I included content from this interview.  Thanks for visiting my [...]

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