Panel Statement

Panel: DON’T HATE THE BUSINESS: BECOME THE BUSINESS!

The de­vel­op­ment of an in­for­ma­tion econ­omy, and in par­tic­u­lar its more re­cent ‘so­cial econ­omy’ phase, has seen the plu­ral­iza­tion of con­cep­tions of value (Stark, 2009). The rise of brands, the grow­ing im­por­tance of rep­u­ta­tion, both for in­di­vid­u­als and for com­pa­nies, the need to at­tract af­fec­tive in­vest­ments and in gen­eral to es­tab­lish a pos­i­tive large-scale recog­ni­tion for com­pa­nies are all man­i­fes­ta­tion of this.  While com­pa­nies have clearly iden­ti­fied the strate­gic im­por­tance of these “in­tan­gi­ble as­sets”, an ad­e­quate and broadly ac­cepted in­ter­pre­ta­tion of how such im­ma­te­r­ial wealth is trans­formed into tan­gi­ble mon­e­tary value still lack. The issue of the new forms of value cre­ation has grown in im­por­tance with the dif­fu­sion of on­line so­cial media. This is be­cause so­cial media, such as Face­book and Twit­ter allow these sub­jec­tive per­cep­tions of “value”, like the ex­pe­ri­ence of or af­fec­tive ties that peo­ple can con­struct with a com­pany or a brand, to ac­quire an ob­jec­tive ex­is­tence as ob­serv­able and mea­sur­able forms of value.  As a con­se­quence, sev­eral new data min­ing tech­niques, such as opin­ion min­ing and sen­ti­ment analy­sis have emerged in the last few years. Among other things, such as mar­ket­ing and pro­fil­ing, these al­go­rithms are aimed to cre­ate a com­mon “mea­sure” of so­cial af­fec­tive in­vest­ments around a brand or a com­pany which can serves as a base to es­tab­lish a new “gen­eral equiv­a­lent”, i.e. gen­eral sen­ti­ment (Arvids­son, forth­com­ing).  My pre­sen­ta­tion will try to dis­en­tan­gle how the on­line so­cial re­la­tions are in­te­grated into the process of value cre­ation and in the mon­e­tary cir­cuit.

• Elanor Colleoni is a Post-Doc Re­searcher at the De­part­ment of In­ter­cul­tural Com­mu­ni­ca­tion and Man­age­ment, Copen­hagen Busi­ness School, DK. With a back­ground in com­puter sci­ence and so­ci­ol­ogy, she is cur­rently work­ing on the pro­ject “Re­spon­si­ble Busi­ness in the Bl­o­gos­phere” (RBB). Elanor is in­ves­ti­gat­ing the re­la­tion­ship be­tween in­for­ma­tion dif­fu­sion and emo­tional con­tent in so­cial media and the im­pact of so­cial re­la­tions on brand and cor­po­rate rep­u­ta­tion in new media.

Full text (PDF) p. 493-495 [title slightly different]