Social Media Use by Chambers of Commerce and Industry (TCCI) in Turkey

Introduction

Information and communication technologies have become an important part of our life. Especially the Internet and the Web together have deeply affected our lives from education to communication, from business to entertainment for the past decades. But that was not the case at the beginning of the Internet. In the early years of the Internet, web sites were static, according to Tim Berners-Lee “read-only” websites (Shivalingaiah & Naik, 2008), did not have interactive content and allowed its users to have unilateral communication (Acılar, 2015; Acılar & Mersin, 2015). This first phase of the World Wide Web (WWW) is called as “Web 1.0”. The earliest Web sites provided little opportunity for two-way communication, presumably at best providing contact information such as mailing address, e-mail, or phone number (Andzulis, Panagopoulos, & Rapp, 2012).

Since it was invented in 1989, the WWW has evolved greatly through the years and it continues to grow and evolve. Today, in addition to static content, Web sites enable people to collaborate, share information, and create new services and content online (Laudon & Laudon, 2012: 272). This stage of WWW is called as “Web 2.0”. Web 2.0, also known as read-write web, is defined by O'Reilly (2007) as “the network as platform, spanning all connected devices; Web 2.0 applications are those that make the most of the intrinsic advantages of that platform: delivering software as a continually-updated service that gets better the more people use it, consuming and remixing data from multiple sources, including individual users, while providing their own data and services in a form that allows remixing by others, creating network effects through an “architecture of participation,” and going beyond the page metaphor of Web 1.0 to deliver rich user experiences.” Unlike Web 1.0, Web 2.0 allows more interaction with less control (Aghaei, Nematbakhsh & Farsani, 2012). Web 2.0 can be defined as a collection of second generation online technologies and services that enable users to communicate create content and share it with each other via communities, social networks and virtual worlds more easily than before (Jussila, Kärkkäinen & Aramo-Immonen, 2014). The concept of “Web 2.0” was born with a conference brainstorming session between O’Reilly and MediaLive International (O’Reilly, 2005) according to a common acceptance in the literature. Web 2.0 has four characteristic features: interactivity, real-time user control, social participation, and user-generated content (Laudon and Laudon, 2012, p. 272). Web 2.0 includes technologies and services such as blogs, really simple syndication (RSS), wikis, mashups, tags, folksonomy, and tag clouds (Aghaei, Nematbakhsh & Farsani, 2012).