Research Path of Miia Äkkinen

Research project: Social media in business use

akkinen — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 22:17:04 +0000

I was going to participate Digital Innovation Workshop in Tampere last week but I was sick that day. My supervisor, professor Virpi Tuunainen presented our research project at the workshop (see the picture). Our research group consists of me, professor Virpi Tuunainen, and professor Matti Rossi – we come all from Helsinki School of Economics from the department of Information Systems Science.

We will explore the use of social media in Finnish and Swedish companies. Our plan is to evaluate the social media use in companies that already utilize Facebook business accounts (Facebook fan pages) or have Twitter microblogging accounts. We will explore the extent of use of these new services by companies and try to identify the most progressive ones for further research. We will explore Finnish and Swedish companies in order to ensure sufficient number of sample companies. Furthermore, these two neighboring Nordic countries are both considered pioneers in the global ICT markets. For instance, Jaiku and Spotify are social media startups that originated in Finland and Sweden, whereas Nokia and Ericsson are globally known mobile phone enterprises.

Read the abstract or see the slides.

Social networks now more popular than email

akkinen — Thu, 26 Mar 2009 07:50:56 +0000

Now it has happened. Social Media Optimization reported that according to a survey made by Nielsen Online, social networks have become more popular than email. Personally I prefer social networks but all my friends or colleagues haven’t registrated to any networks. At the moment I think I still use more email than social networks.

Four visual presentations of social media

akkinen — Tue, 24 Mar 2009 07:23:24 +0000

Thanks to Andrea Vascellari, I found a link to these four visual presentations of social media (conversation prism, social media starfish, web 2.0 landscape and web 2.0 framework). Very informative, very useful and so simple.

A great picture of blogosphere :)

akkinen — Wed, 03 Dec 2008 15:55:02 +0000

A great picture of blogosphere! I smiled when first saw this picture – a perfect picture for a researcher who has been reading books for her little children several years This picture could be right from a fairy tale but it tells so well about the blogosphere. See yourself!

Web 2.0 in B2B context

akkinen — Tue, 02 Dec 2008 10:31:38 +0000

Koroberi added great web 2.0 elements to the web site of a traditional material handling company FKI Logistex, for example videos and photos were added to the site. I was interested in this case because mostly all the example are in B2C context and examples of B2B solutions are not so common yet.

Large Finnish companies don’t blog

akkinen — Tue, 02 Dec 2008 10:24:29 +0000

Taloussanomat just reported that large Finnish companies don’t use blogs in their business. In Sweden large companies use blogs a lot but in Finland only Nokia blogs. The blogging culture of 132 large Nordic companies was studied by consulting office Pohjoisranta and Burson-Marsteller. And only 11 blogs were found: 1 in Finland (Nokia), 1 in Norway and 9 in Sweden (e.g. ABB, Volvo, Ericsson, Electrolux, Skanska).

The partner in Pohjoisranta, Tommi Siikaniva, says in Taloussanomat that the result is surprising considering the Finnish knowhow in high technology. He would have thought that public blogs would have been used as a marketing channel much more. In Swedish blogs the economists give tips for households in the blog of Swedbanken, and Ericsson blogs about the achievements of its sailing team. Siikaniva says that in Sweden the companies want to show that they communicate with its customer and audience. In the end of the article Siikaniva mentioned that the blogs could also be used as a tool for building image and reputation.

Netnography – etnography 2.0?

akkinen — Mon, 13 Oct 2008 19:59:27 +0000

I found Kozinets in 2004 when I studied qualitative research, and paid some attention to research ethics and Internet. Then he mentioned netnography (etnography on the Internet) but now this method is a more known, and he is even publishing a Sage book about it.

I have data from electronic focus interviews from 2004 – pretty old… So I will have to supplement / update my data to meet qualifications. This method, netnography, sounds interesting. Netnography fits to a world of Internet communities. I could have data from an online community, observe and analyze the messages. Next I will do some research if this method is used in ISS field.

Utilitarian and hedonic motivation

akkinen — Sun, 12 Oct 2008 20:28:19 +0000

An interesting conference will be held in Helsinki next month. The theme of this GEBSI seminar is “Understanding Consumer use of IT“. One of the main speakers is Hans van der Hejden, and I found his research very interesting – he talks about hedonic and utilitarian information systems.

This sounds promising! I have been analyzing my data and the motives why people join online communities could easily fall in these two main categories: utilitarian and hedonic. I will have to look at the data bases also from this point of view.

Social object theory -interesting!

akkinen — Wed, 08 Oct 2008 11:20:36 +0000

I did some google search with words “virtual community course”, and found the course material of Howard Rheingold, the guru himself. Especially the Session 12 interested me because it’s theme was social capital. From the material I found a following reference:

Jyri Engestrom, (2001) “Sizing up Social Capital” in Engeström, Y. (ed.) Activity Theory and Social Capital. Technical Reports 5, Center for Activity theory and Developmental Work Research, University of Helsinki 2001.

Interesting! Rheingold is refering to a Finnish research! Oh yeah, this was the Jaiku man. Next I clicked myself to Mr. Engeström’s blog, and there -voilà:
Why some social network services work and others don’t — Or: the case for object-centered sociality

“The social networking services that really work are the ones that are built around objects. And, in my experience, their developers intuitively ‘get’ the object-centered sociality way of thinking about social life. Flickr, for example, has turned photos into objects of sociality. On del.icio.us the objects are the URLs. EVDB, Upcoming.org, and evnt focus on events as objects.”

Another excellent finding: “Five principles for web 2.0 success by Jyri Engeström”.

After reading these texts I had to take a closer look on this social object theory because it sounded so appropriate for my purposes. I found a few references: Social objects for sharing designs by Graínne Conole and a comment for her by Ann Jones. This path demands absolutely a closer research.

New start

akkinen — Wed, 08 Oct 2008 09:56:14 +0000

I have now re-started my studies after a three-year break. I noticed that all kinds of interesting things happened during these years: breaktrough of social media and web 2.0, enourmous success of social software, facebook etc. I was scared that my topic is sooo out-of-date but after reading now some latest articles this isn’t the truth, however. Even though the amount of online communities have jumped up, the question how companies can use them in a valuable way is still relevant. Every community can’t be a facebook!

This is the place where I am going to archive my academic journey from a new start to a dissertation. I am going to discuss with myself (and maybe with you?) about appropriate theories, data inquiry methods, interesting articles and so on. Feel free to comment things!