IRC Seminar: Platforms as service ecosystems: Lessons from social media

Time: 13:00-14:00

Lunch: 12:30

Location: LG01, Henley Business School, Whiteknights

Registration: Free

Presenter: Prof. Cristina Alaimo - Assistant Professor in Digital Economy at Surrey Business School, University of Surrey, UK

Abstract:

The growing business expansion of social media platforms is changing their identity and transforming the practices of networking, data and content sharing with which social media have been commonly associated. We empirically investigate these shifts in the context of TripAdvisor and its evolution since its very establishment. We trace the mutations of the platform along three stages we identify as search engine, social media platform and end-to-end service ecosystem. Our findings reveal the underlying patterns of data types, technological functionalities and actor configurations that punctuate the business expansion of TripAdvisor and lead to the formation of its service ecosystem. We contribute to the understanding of the current trajectory in which social media find themselves as well as to the literature on platforms and ecosystems. We point out the importance of services that develop as commercially viable and constantly updatable data bundles out of diverse and dynamic data types. Such services are essential to the making of the complementarities that are claimed to underlie ecosystem formation.

Bio:

Cristina Alaimo is currently an Assistant Professor in Digital Economy at Surrey Business School, University of Surrey, UK. She holds a Ph.D. in Information Systems from the Department of Management, LSE - London School of Economics and Political Science, UK. Her research is concerned with digital and social media platforms. It focuses on the production of data-based services and the type of innovation they bring within and across organizations. She is interested also in studying the broader ecosystem of data exchanges in which digital platforms are embedded and how these new platform ecosystems emerge and evolve. Cristina’s current projects explore the automated bidding process regulating ads exchange in the programmatic advertising ecosystem, the data value chain on social media platforms, behavioral control mechanisms on Wikipedia, the formation of TripAdvisor’s ecosystem and the evolution of music discovery platform Last.fm Her recent publication “Computing the Everyday: Social Media as Data platforms” in The Information Society (co-authored with Jannis Kallinikos) has been the first runner-up in the category Best Published Paper Award, for the Academy of Management, OCIS 2018.