School of Information Systems

Technological Factors in the Digital Environment

Digital era, maybe that’s a right thing to say in this time, as we know, Technology evolve very fast, yesterday we just can imagine something about technology, now, we can do it. I can take simple example, the past 5 years, we cannot imagine how can a car driving itself, now, we can see, many manufactures of car that invent artificial intelligence to makes a car driving itself.

Technology was made to helping people doing something, make something more easy to do. That’s why, people invent cellular phone, slow but sure, cellular phone turn into smartphone, as we know it now. Quoted from StatCounter, smartphone usage is overtaking desktop. Why ? because with our smartphone, we can do the same things like we used desktop, we can still play games, working, listen music, browsing, chatting, etc. And remember something, smartphone dimension, is very small, if we compared with desktop PC. That why Technology factor (on this point is smartphone) is very changing the people.

There is a lot of advantages that we can get from technology nowadays :

  • Ease of information access
  • Ease of mobility
  • Cost efficiency
  • Artificial intelligence
  • Learning (as we know, technologies now is so important, Corona or covid19 makes every university stop their offline class and turn into online class)

However there so many advantages, yet still have disadvantages :

  • People being gadget freak, or ill call it smartphone freak, their lost their contacts with people who close to them
  • Technology makes people more lazy
  • The more high tech, the more hazardous weapon can created
  • Companies that smoke out, destroy ozone slowly
  • Privacy someone threatened
  • Job loss, some manufactured has change their labor into machine

After looking for advantages and disadvantages from technology, its so hard stem the development of technologies, we as user must be smart people, do not let smartphone using by not smart people, although there so many disadvantages of technology, but we must take advantages from this, to do E-Business Strategy.

Social media in this time is the most popular things that many people using it. Starting from news, gossips, politics, business, relations, and many more. Social media has been using by 45% of the current population in 2019, and it keep growing in 2020. 90.4% millennials, 77.5% gen x, and 48.4% baby boomers has using social media quoted by Emarketer, 2019. I can bet, some of you have more than one account on one social media, one for your close friend, and another one for the public one, and that’s proof, that social media is so important in this era.

Why smartphone is one of the best E-Business strategy, especially social media :

  • Build Awareness : with social media, we can reach a million of people with a limited time, we can build people awareness about our brand, about our products, and everything that we want to build in social media
  • Provide Support : social media also can remove barriers between customer and companies, that customer can chit chat with companies through social media, companies also can know what customer complains about our company.
  • Learn more about Customer : when you have social media, you have traffic, when you have traffic, you have a lot of data where you can develop by yourself, you can know who is your buyer, whether male or female, which generation buy the most of our products, distribution map of sales, and many more, that can boost efficiency of sales.
  • Targeted advertising : after we learn about our customer, it’s a good thing to know our targeted advertising customer. Simple as if most of our customer is millennial, we can use Youtube, Instagram to catch them up, if most of our customer is baby boomer, there is a different way to advertising, but, still using social media. Its important to know our targeted customer, so our advertising not useless at all.
  • Boost sales : when you using social media for E-Business Strategy, it might be boosting your sales, moreover if you using brand ambassador from public figure, it can be more boost you sales of product or services.
  • Grow Affordably : this the main reason why social media is the best E-Business strategy, its cheaper than using traditional strategy (like newspaper ads, billboard, etc), you can reach the same even more than you using traditional strategy.
  • Keep an eye on the competition : it is important to know where we are in competition arena, when we feel we left behind with competitors, we can doing some improvement, to catch it up.

Even that, we must be careful with social media, social media can be boomerang to us, a lot of people can judge us in social media, moreover if we doing something wrong. That’s why, we must be smart people who using smartphone, don’t let smartphone and the progress of technology make a fool of us. Using smartphone and social media carefully, even more so on this Corona pandemic, spread good news, don’t let hoax destroying our country, even our world slowly. Keep spread positive vibes to everybody. Stay safe and stay healthy.

References :

  • https://advergize.com/edu/10-advantages-technology-modern-life/
  • https://www.quora.com/What-are-the-disadvantages-of-using-technology
  • https://www.oberlo.com/blog/social-media-marketing-statistics
  • https://eclincher.com/blog/43-of-the-best-social-media-quotes/
  • https://marketinginsidergroup.com/content-marketing/why-social-media-is-important-for-business-marketing/
  • https://blog.hootsuite.com/social-media-for-business/
RICKY PRATAMA