Effectiveness of corporate social media activities in increasing relational outcomes

Corporate Users' Attachment to Social Networking Sites: Examining the Role of Social Capital and Perceived Benefits

The debate on the pros and cons of employee attachment to social networking sites (SNS) has led to social media policy paralysis in many organizations, and often a prohibition on employee use of SNS. This paper examines corporate users' attachment to SNS. An analysis of 316 survey responses showed that corporate users' socialization in large public SNS was steeped in perceived work-related benefits, which in turn nourished their SNS attachment. Social use outperformed informational use in generating perceived work-related benefits from SNS. Weak ties in large heterogeneous networks resulted in strategic and operational benefits, whereas the effects of strong bonding in homogenous networks were limited to operational benefits. The paper contributes to research on SNS use by corporate users and the debate on the effect of SNS use for work. The findings will benefit SNS strategists of organizations and policymakers to exploit the benefit potential of public SNS.

Idea Co-creation on Social Media Platforms

Innovation scholars have long been discussing social media as a rich source of information, knowledge, and new ideas, yet, whether or how social media can directly intervene with organizational ideation processes remains unclear. In this study, we investigate the impact of external and enterprise social media platforms on organizational ideation. Grounded in 79 cases and adapting social capital theory in social media contexts, this study attempts to develop a theory of social ideation. Social ideation consists of social media-enabled mechanisms that generate social capital, enable multi-level social exchanges, foster idea co-creation activities such as idea sourcing, filtering, elaboration, and integration, and ultimately lead to effective ideation. Our study contributes to social media and innovation research by revealing the intermediary mechanisms that link the use of social media platforms to organizational ideation performance.

A moderated mediation model linking transactive memory system and social media with shared leadership and team innovation

This study examines how and to what extent social and technological factors promote shared leadership that leads to team innovation in knowledge work teams. It hypothesizes that a transactive memory system influence team innovation and shared leadership conduits the relationship between them. Additionally, the relationship effectiveness between the transactive memory system and shared leadership increases with the use of social media by team members. Time-lagged, multi-sourced data are collected from the information technology industry in China. In addition, we used a network-based measure to assess the level of shared leadership in teams. Empirical analysis found support for the hypotheses of this study. The results reveal that transactive memory system is a significant predictor of team innovation and the shared leadership channels the relationship between transactive memory system and team innovation. Furthermore, use of social media by team members amplifies the relationship between transactive memory system and shared leadership. The implications of the study are discussed in the later sections.

Unraveling the Effects of Ethical Leadership on Knowledge Sharing: The Mediating Roles of Subjective Well-Being and Social Media in the Hotel Industry

Given the pivotal function of ethical leadership (EL) in the hospitality industry, this study explains how moral guidance can help to reduce mental stress. The modern complex and hectic working style of organizations demands ethical conduct, in order to sustain the positive behavior of employees for knowledge sharing (KS). For this reason, in this study, we restrict our awareness to the usage of social media (SM) for social identity and aspects of subjective well-being (SWB) for happiness intensity. The time-lag method is applied for data collection from 406 supervisors and subordinates of the hotel industry in Pakistan. Partial least squares structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM) and bootstrapping are utilized to scan the data. The results of the current study demonstrate that ethical leadership provides motivational strength for knowledge sharing amongst employees. Moreover, the serial mediation effects of subjective well-being and social media boost knowledge sharing by the induction of ethical values. Our findings indicate that knowledge sharing is an important product of subjective well-being and social media. Therefore, we recommend that managers focus on ethical leadership values and employee well-being (e.g., life satisfaction), as well as highlight the individuality of employees to promote knowledge sharing. The presented research adds to the literature by establishing a new connection between ethical leadership and knowledge sharing by opening the black box of contextual (i.e., ethical leadership) and developmental (i.e., subjective well-being and social media) factors.

Manipulating Temporal Cues and Message Concreteness for Deal Communication

Online merchants often use social media to communicate deal messages to directed consumers, but they face the fundamental challenge of how to effectively communicate deal messages to these consumers using that medium. This research seeks to address this challenge by building on the construal level theory to theorize that consumers' purchase intentions in response to the products promoted via social media communication are affected by the concreteness of promotion messages and its interaction with message promotional time and deal expiration time. A between-subject experiment was conducted, and the findings suggest that concrete messages lead to higher purchase intentions. Through interacting message concreteness, message promotional time and deal expiration time, we show that the congruency of a concrete message with either, but not both, temporal cue lead to higher purchase intention. This study thus provides theoretically grounded insights on how to better communicate deal information on microblogging sites.

PERCEPTION OR CAPABILITIES? AN EMPIRICAL INVESTIGATION OF THE FACTORS INFLUENCING THE ADOPTION OF SOCIAL MEDIA AND PUBLIC CLOUD IN GERMAN SMEs

Social media and public cloud computing (SM&PC) have emerged as important resources of small and medium enterprises (SMEs), but not all SMEs use SM&PC. The existing research predominantly focuses on the role of either the features of social media and cloud computing in relation to the perceptions of decision makers or the internal capabilities of organization concerning new innovation adoption. By integrating multidisciplinary literature, we, instead, argues that both the perception- and capability-related factors could play an important role in the adoption of new ICT technology, such as SM&PC. Therefore, we empirically investigated the decision maker’s perception-related and SME’s capability-related factors that may influence the adoption of SM&PC in SMEs in Germany. We used quantitative research methods to examine the proposed hypotheses on a sample of 2,404 SMEs from 17 industrial sectors. The results demonstrate that the decisions of German SMEs to engage in social media and cloud computing are not only influenced by the perceptions of SME owners about the usefulness, security aspects, and the implementation costs of SM&PC, but also by the internal capabilities of an SME, namely the innovativeness of an SME. The results and potential contributions of our research are discussed.

A Conceptual Model of the Challenges of Social Media Big Data for Citizen e-Participation: A Systematic Review

The emergence of Citizen Relationship Management (CzRM) for government plays a central role in developing citizen relationships and e-participation. As such, the South African government has shown its commitment towards citizenry and the provision of effective service delivery. Social Media Analytics (SMA) has emerged as a potential new solution to support decision-making for service delivery in CzRM. It is believed that the demand for SMA adoption will increasingly rise. However, the reality of social media Big Data comes with the challenges of analysing it in a way that brings Big Value. The purpose of this paper is to identify the challenges of social media Big Data Analytics (BDA) and to incorporate these in a conceptual model that can be used by governments to support the e-participation of citizens. The model was developed through a systematic literature review (SLR). The findings revealed that data challenges relate to designing an optimal architecture for analysing data that caters for both historic data and real-time data at the same time. The paper highlight that process challenges relate to all the activities in the data lifecycle such as data acquisition and warehousing; data mining and cleaning; data aggregation and integration; analysis and modelling; and data interpretation. The paper also identifies six types of data management challenges: privacy, security, data governance, data and information sharing, cost/operational expenditures, and data ownership.

Identifying customer knowledge on social media through data analytics

Purpose

Customer knowledge from social media can become an important organizational asset. The purpose of this paper is to identify useful customer knowledge including knowledge for customer, knowledge about customers and knowledge from customers from social media data and facilitate social media-based customer knowledge management.

Design/methodology/approach

The authors conducted a case study to analyze people’s online discussion on Twitter regarding laptop brands and manufacturers. After collecting relevant tweets using Twitter search APIs, the authors applied statistical analysis, text mining and sentiment analysis techniques to analyze the social media data set and visualize relevant insights and patterns in order to identify customer knowledge.

Findings

The paper identifies useful insights and knowledge from customers and knowledge about customers from social media data. Furthermore, the paper shows how the authors can use knowledge from customers and knowledge about customers to help companies develop knowledge for customers.

Originality/value

This is an original social media analytics study that discusses how to transform large-scale social media data into useful customer knowledge including knowledge for customer, knowledge about customers and knowledge from customers.

Social Media and Customer-Based Brand Equity: An Empirical Investigation in Retail Industry

As customer-brand engagement progressively shifts to digital domains, understanding social media effects in branding has become a vital issue. Social media effectiveness is especially important for the US retail sector due to intense competition among retailers for consumer attention and engagement on digital channels. Yet, the research on the effectiveness of social media in the retail industry remains sparse. Thus, the purpose of this paper is to investigate how social media affects US retailers’ customer-based brand equity (CBBE) which is an important indicator of brand success. Using a dataset of 15,717 retailer-day observations, the authors empirically test the dynamics between owned and earned social media and CBBE using panel vector autoregression (PVAR). The authors find strong impacts of owned and earned social media on CBBE across the board. However, they find that owned social media harms CBBE of retailers dealing in hedonic and high involvement products. Whereas owned social media helps general retailers in building CBBE, it reduces CBBE of specialty retailers.

Social media marketing in luxury brands

Purpose

Digital technologies and social media have improved the connectivity and collaboration between firms and customers in all sectors. However, in the luxury sector, the approach to social media and digital technologies has been slower than in other industries. The purpose of this paper is to review the academic literature on social media marketing in luxury brands to highlight the current state of the art, the addressed key research themes and the implications for management research and practice.

Design/methodology/approach

A systematic literature review of academic research on social media marketing has been conducted to gather, examine and synthetize studies related to luxury brands. By following a review protocol based on both automatic and manual search on the Scopus database, all relevant studies on luxury brands were identified and analyzed.

Findings

A critical conceptualization of social media marketing in luxury brands has been provided and the emerging key research themes have been categorized into four main areas.

Originality/value

Academic literature about social media marketing activities in luxury firms is very limited and existing studies focus only on certain aspects, contexts or single cases. In contrast, the value of this study, for both academics and practitioners, lies in providing, for the first time, a comprehensive and critical systematization of social media marketing academic literature in the field of luxury brands.

Running with the Pack

Prior literature has utilized many theories to explain an organization's post-adoption technology use of social media platforms, but none of the common models include status as either a primary or a moderating variable. This is a significant gap in the literature because status is a structural enabler and inhibitor that determines acceptable and unacceptable behavior in a given setting. In an empirical study of Twitter and the cultural norm of retweeting for a sample of US colleges and universities, the authors demonstrate the following: (1) middle-status institutions had a higher likelihood of following the retweeting cultural norm relative to their high- and low-status counterparts, (2) middle- and low-status institutions who followed the retweeting cultural norm in a manner consistent with their status experienced greater post-adoption success relative to those institutions who did not, but the reverse was evident for high-status institutions (who appear to be rewarded for deviation from this cultural norm), and (3) the negative effect of deviating from retweeting cultural norms on post-adoption success is more pronounced with decreasing status.