INCORPORATING SOCIAL MEDIA IN RESEARCH AND ACADEMICS Dr.S.Mercy Gnana Gandhi Dept of English, Sathyabama University drmerci2010@gmail.com Abstract: The evolution of internet technology and subsequent increase in the use of online social networking applications have been undeniably considered as a milestone in the web history. Recent advances in web science allow users to create websites, manage their identities and stay connected with others, providing comprehensive digital traces of social actions, interactions and transactions. With its profound impact on our daily lives, social media has become the most important conduit for brands to build loyalty, empowering the consumers with a wealth of information at finger tips. No doubt, online social networks have revolutionized the practice of interaction among the researchers, who demand new methods and tools for collecting, processing and mining the data. Being a bundle of techniques and technologies, these networks are really an extensive attempt to promote the researchers to render the ideas of communication, collaboration and collection. Such networking resources help us in developing collaboration among different organizations, universities around the world by exploring the benefits of research activities and also by extending the promotion of academics. Organizations find it an advantage for reaching a large pool of potential consumers with less time and effort. Now, with the effective display of online web based tools, collaborative working ambience is the need of the hour, for any academic institution, for enhancing the productivity and for promoting the results. However, this type of socializing has raised concerns about the privacy and security of internet users. The present paper briefly discusses the task of social media in research and academics, the various networking resources and tools and also their impacts on researchers and students. Keywords: Internet Technology, Social networks, Social media, researchers, academics, online I. INTRODUCTION: With the advent of the internet and technology information, the world has become closer and the interaction among the community has become limitless through social media like newspapers, telephone, emails, SMS services, scraps, blogs or through social networking sites. Particularly, researchers, academicians and scientists completely rely on social networks to gear up their professional profile, to express their ideas and to transfer information. This paper is definitely an attempt to familiarize the researchers, scientists and scholars about the latest online networking tools and resources , focusing on the three main ideas of communication, collaboration and collection through social networks. Such networks can change the way by which a research is undertaken and has come up new forms of communication in a efficient way. Social Media- A culture? Social media is an internet service in which the online contents are generated by the service consumers. It draws together a variety of social networking tools with different functionality and unique culture. Building up a healthy network takes time and the process of building, creating and filtering useful networks is absolutely a skill, which needs to have much practice. The proper utilization of social media and the development of phenomenol networking is a mixed blessing for the researchers and academicians of this age. The service providers of these networks have unique policies for the consumer generated content and numerous procedures for data collection, sharing and publication. For instance, Face book is used exclusively for social purposes whereas LinkedIn has been used mainly for professional networking. II. SOCIAL NETWORKING TOOLS A. Communication networking tools Blogging (Blogger, TypePad, WordPress LiveJournal), Microblogging (Twitter, Google Buzz ,Yammer),Location (Facebook Places,Foursquare, Gowalla) Social networking(LinkedIn, MySpace, Facebook) Aggregators ( Pageflakes, iGoogle, Google Reader, Netvibes) are few of the Communication networking tools. International Journal on Information Science & Computer, Vol. 8 No.2 July 2014 7