Using social networks in a professional way may cause the result of academic or business ecosystems in the open and casual social network context. That requires the owner of social networks to strategically organize the information conveyed through websites. The owner may categorize various websites into different functions, such as use Facebook to contact with families and use twitter to meet new people. And for one specific network the owner needs to carefully edit all the information on areas like personal profile or messages he or she send through it. Main considerations are needed such as make clear what’s the purpose of social networks, what information the owner is looking for or expressing out, how the owner may manage the networks like the update frequency and what kind of media the owner wants to use (audio, video, words or images).
On the other side, digital tools play an important role to help people find professional information from other’s social networks such as search for academic resources, public topics or business strategies. The searcher may generate a persona which contains his or her valuable characters needed for the project after the objective of the searching, people group who may contribute to the objective has been decided. Then through tools like Twitter search engine, Storify and Google Adword Keyword Tool the searcher can find the appropriate people and strike up conversations.
From the lecture we have today I see how social networks play a role in very professional uses. And this also makes me consider culture differences among social networks, for example it’s rarer to see people use Weibo (Chinese Twitter) or Renren (Chinese Facebook) to discuss academic topics or business thinking (the business accounts focus more on advertising competition). In fact it’s quite useful and important for people to share opinions and insights of professional issues online and social networks should be strong and efficient tools to put it into practice.
Zoe Yin Design Thinking 