Question

1. Do research on the Web to identify examples of a social network allowing a large national retailer to mine its data to learn more about the social network members and to develop targeted direct mailings and emails promoting its products. What are the pros and cons of sharing such data? How do social network members feel when they learn that their data is being shared? In your opinion, under what conditions is this a legitimate use of social network member data?

Answer 1

Social media mining is a process in which a large amount of user's data is taken from social media sites and different applications in order to obtain a pattern . This pattern helps big private and non-private organizations to conclude about what is trending on Internet which they use it to define their own strategies to produce their new products or services .

e.g - Twitter is a social networking service where user's post tweets and this tweets can be useful in order to obtain an opinion about any product or organization or people etc.In a way ,sentiment analysis can be done on the data obtained i.e categorizing data as positive,negative or neutral in order to discern subjective opinion of the data.

For example,if you have a product based company then you can use last 2000 tweets which contain your company name to obtain an opinion about how well your product is doing in market.

Pros of sharing data :-

1. Data mining helps the organization to make fruitful decision ,according to the analysis of data extract from social sites, in order to improve their product quality
2. It lowers chances of immature policy decision of organization.
3. Many development department choose channels on which there are more number of people active and then they define their activities and strategies and reach to the users.

Cons of sharing data :-

1. Privacy is compromised as when you try to access information about a brand in his social interaction,you have to go through user's personal interaction.
2. Security is less as many companies can get user data generated by a single click sign-in through their personal accounts

When social network members learnt about their data is being shared, they have to boycott these activities performed by organization as no wants to reveal their personal interaction in front of anyone .

This is not a legitimate use of social network members data . Even if any organization wants to share their members data with others then a special permission should be taken from each member. If the member himself grants a permission then organization can use anywhere . Also, a member should be informed at the earliest that their data can be shared for these purposes.