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Rumen Vyrbanov
The Business Potential of Social Media Platforms
Summary:
Web 2.0 technologies have changed the business environment and have become a ‘must’ of any business strategy, whether it is a large company or a small and medium-sized enterprise.
Modern social media have a lot of sophisticated tools and technologies that can be successfully used to attract new customers, promote brand (recognizable identity for our product or service), boost sales, increase a company’s website traffic, build effective customer relationships, manage online reputation, facilitate communication with customers, incl. online, optimize search engines, etc. However, at the same time, social media are not just a collection of new tools and technologies – they develop and establish new business models, and require that managers and business owners have a lot of new knowledge and a new way of thinking.
In the social media environment small enterprises can successfully compete with large companies, regardless of the different advertising and marketing budgets. Although modest, the existing experience shows that with an adequate viral campaign organized in the social Web space small and medium-sized enterprises can generate huge traffic to their sites, improve communications with customers and achieve greater sales.
This study attempts to offer practical solutions for using social media in business processes. It focuses on several questions:
• What the Web 2.0 potential is expressed in for businesses and what ad¬vantages it provides;
• What the specific characteristics of social Web space are that are important in the use of Web 2.0 for business purposes;
• What the content behind the term ‘social media’ is and what its business poten¬tial is;
• What the nature and scope of social media is and what reasons justify the huge interest of businesses in them in recent years;
• How Social Media Optimization (SMO) and Social Media Marketing (SMM) can be used in the interest of businesses.
The first part of the study examines the basic characteristics and specific features of the second generation of Web services contributing to the use of Web 2.0 for business purposes. According to the author the new way of interaction and the ease of integration that are characteristic of Web 2.0 are expected to make radical changes in corporate information systems (IS), and hence in the business of companies.
The second part analyzes the nature and manifestation of social media. It gives a brief overview of social media and describes their potential for the development of small and medium-sized businesses, concluding that social media tools can be used successfully to attract customers, increase traffic to the website, boost sales, promote the brand and form a target audience. However, at the same time social media are something more than business tools – they require a new way of thinking, a new ap¬proach to the business of the company and to customers, an orderly and reasoned strategy for working in the new social environment.
The third part presents the capabilities of the two new and still not widely used tools for the popularization of the site in the social media – Social Media Optimization (SMO) and Social Media Marketing (SMM). Companies that will migrate to Web 2.0 have to have a good understanding of SMM tools in order to be able to determine which of them are suitable for a particular business and how to approach their actual use. The author argues that the good performance of the site on the Web and providing more traffic today require an integrated approach in using the various techniques for digital and traditional marketing.
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Wei Bin Zhang
GLOBAL SOCIAL STATUS, NATIONAL SPIRITS OF CAPITALISM, AND ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT
Summary:
This paper constructs a global economic growth model with endogenous social status, endogenous preferences, and wealth accumulation. The economic system is based the Solow model, the Uzawa two-sector model, and the Oniki-Uzawa trade model. We base our approach to measuring social status on some ideas in the literature of economic growth with endogenous growth. The model is specially based on a model proposed by Zhang (2016). This study considers relative social status as a function of a country’s relative wealth per household with the global average per household wealth. It treats time distribution between leisure and work as endogenous variables. The world economy is composed of any number of national economies and each national economy consists of one capital goods sector and one consumer goods sector. National economies differ in social status, preferences, spirits of capitalism, and productivities. We build the model for -country world economy and express the dynamics with differential equations. We simulate the movement of a 3-country global economy and carried out comparative dynamic analysis with regard to some parameters
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Nikolay Ninov
Efficiency of the Social Assistance System in Bulgaria through Planning the Use of European Funds
Summary:
Within the social policy implemented to alleviate the worst forms of deprivation and combat poverty, targeting European Union citizens that are most affected by the socio-economic crisis, and through the Fund for European Aid to the Most Deprived, the European Commission finalized the process of adoption of all national operational programmes for the period 2014-2020 amounting to a total value of 3.8 billion Euros. These funds will be spent on achieving social cohesion and implementing one of the main objectives of the Europe 2020 Strategy – “Lifting at least 20 million people out of the risk of poverty or social exclusion”. The Republic of Bulgaria received 104.8 million Euros to finance social benefits and social services aimed at promoting social inclusion, thereby the national social assistance system is expected to demonstrate greater effectiveness and efficiency in spending them
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Metody Kanev
THE METAMORPHOSES OF CAPITAL AND HUMAN DEVELOPMENT
Summary:
The paper is an attempt to clarify the importance of the human, the cultural and the social capital and their metamorphoses in result of their mutual complementarity and conversiveness. By becoming major factors of life reproduction in general, they also act as essential organizing principles of the functional and structural model of social self-organisation and performance and human development
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Venelin Terziev
THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE LABOUR MARKET IN BULGARIA
AND THE IMPACT OF IMPLEMENTED POLICIES REGARDING EMPLOYMENT AND UNEMPLOYMENT
Summary:
The adequacy and timeliness of an implemented policy are crucial for the effective support of changes in the parameters of the labour market and economic development. Considering the time delay of the effects and changes. its duration should not be overlooked in order to develop preventive measures for a timely response. Shortening the period in which the effects of the contemporary crisis are transferred on the labour market, respectively labour demand, reflects not only the degree of elasticity of labour demand to primary markets, but also the flexibility of the implemented policies. This fact has focused attention on the flexibility of labour markets and opportunities through its increase to strengthen the mobility and adaptability of the workforce to the dynamically evolving labour demand.
Considering the features of economic development and the possible impacts on the labour market is gradually becoming an inseparable part of the policy-making process in the labour market. If, in the early periods of the development of the labour market, policies were aimed primarily at tackling the effects of economic reforms on employment, at a later stage labour market policy has a pronouncedly active character and it is aimed at influencing processes or the formation of behaviour among target groups according to pre-planned targets. The functioning labour market is an adequate mechanism of the market environment and the implemented policy is increasingly based on the existing relationships and interactions between the periods of economic development and the labour market.
Regulatory regimes have a certain influence on the development of the basic parameters of the labour market, but overall their impact, and that of the specific policies of the labour market for activation of labour resources, for providing employment and for better labour adaptation of the workforce have effects with limited opportunities towards the balance of labour supply and demand.
The policy on the labour market in Bulgaria during the transition period so far has reflected in varying degrees the needs of the economy . In 1990-2000 this policy was built together with the development of the labour market itself and therefore its nature is mainly preventive. After 2000 the policy of the labour market involves more active programmes and activities that reflect more adequately the changes in the macroeconomic environment and the periods in the economic development. Overall, however, the active policy has a minor and a temporary role in supporting employment and cannot replace investment activities to create jobs. Economic development is crucial for supply and demand in the labour market and for its balance in the different periods of development.
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Rumen Vyrbanov
SOCIAL BUSINESS: USING WEB 2.0 AND SOCIAL NETWORKS
IN THE BUSINESS OF COMPANIES
Summary:
Over the recent years Web 2.0 has been at the forefront of high-tech tools and technologies that companies are seeking to use in their business processes. Web 2.0 has emerged as a new wave of business innovation that gives new dimensions to the Internet as a means of communication, cooperation and doing business.
This study examines the evolution of the Web in the context of opportunities for implementing technologies in companies’ businesses. Emphasis is placed on the second generation of Web technologies and the social business concept – the new opportunities for adapting and using the Web’s ideas and technologies in companies’ businesses. The nature and specific approaches and strategies of social business are presented as a new generation of technologies capable of achieving an increase in companies’ income and profits, seizing new market niches, as well as increasing sharply the labour productivity of employees and their incorporation into the main goals of the business.
The first part analyzes in brief the evolution of the Web technologies and their impact on the business of companies. The focus is on the nature and changes that the second and third generation of technologies (Web 2.0 and Web 3.0) impose on business processes.
The second part examines the priority areas for the application of social technologies in business: management of internal corporate communications, design and development of new products and knowledge management (Intranet environment); corporate communications and interactions with external partners and customers (Extranet environment, B2B model); e-commerce (online stores, B2C model). The practical possibilities of the three approaches for using the social networks in e-business are discussed: opening a representation (an online store) on Facebook or another social network, as an addition to the already existing traditional online store; online trading directly in the social network, without an online store; using the social networks as a complement and alternative to the search engines.
The third part of the study examines social business as an opportunity to use new social platforms for communication between companies and their customers. The nature of the new concept of social cooperation, which ultimately reflects in higher productivity and returns on investment, is analyzed. The author presents and analyzes several aspects of social business in a company’s activities – marketing in a Web 2.0 environment and working with clients of the company, interactions with business partners, personnel management and knowledge management in the company.
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Hrabrin Bashev
THE SUSTAINABILITY
OF MANAGEMENT STRUCTURES
IN BULGARIAN AGRICULTURE – LEVEL, FACTORS AND PROSPECTS
Summary:
This paper assesses the sustainability of the farms in our country by applying the holistic approach. We first introduce the methods employed in our research and provide a general description of the farms included in it. Then we assess the integral, managerial, economic, social and environmental sustainability of farms in general as well as that of the different types of farms according to their size, specialization of production, environmental position and geographical location. Finally, we assess the factors for improving the sustainability of farms and present our conclusions about doing further research work and improving the assessment practice in the sec
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Dimitar Kanev
COMMITMENT AS A CONSTRAINT
TO THE PURSUIT OF SELF-INTEREST
Summary:
By applying the behavioural economics approach and the findings of the empirical survey we conducted, this paper analyses constraints on the pursuit of self-interest. The objective is to transfer scientific insights about the impact which general rules of morality have on human activities; to establish what moral standards govern the community we researched and to provide new empirical evidence about the influence which the sense of duty has on human behaviour. Our research supports the thesis that people are governed by their sense of duty; they care about the well-being of other people and act responsibly and responsively, whether or not they benefit as individuals and groups; they also seek to treat others reciprocally and evaluate market phenomena from the perspective of their moral feelings. Unlike the Homo Economicus, real people are more moral, good-natured and attractive when treated in compliance with established moral standards and more immoral, evil and repulsive when treated contrary to them.
