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MAPPING SOCIAL MEDIA & ORGANIZATIONS: PAST, PRESENT, AND FUTURE.
Hans Terpstra 0486825
Research Master Thesis Communication Science Supervisor: Dr. J.W.M. Verhoeven
27-03-‘15
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Abstract
Although social media are known to most people for more than 10 years now, organizations have stepped into this area much later. Moreover, academic literature on the subject often has depicted social media as a new phenomenon, while organizations have gained much experience with social media. What hasn’t been studied yet is how these experiences are being used with current decisions and company policies. Therefore, this study looked at 15 organizations, both large and SME. Through qualitative research it mapped their social media strategic planning in the past, how this has influenced their conduct on social media today, and how this is going to influence them in the future. It aimed to do so by using sensitizing concepts such as early adoption and sensemaking to measure their social media strategies. Results show that early adoption is employed by both large organizations and SME’s, not only for practical reasons such as webcare but also to find new marketing strategies which previously weren’t applicable without social media. Further sensemaking is thoroughly employed by the organizations and social media strategies are employed aimed at user migration, inbound marketing and organizations creating their alternative social media spaces. Ultimately these findings are discussed including the study’s limitations and implications for future research.
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Introduction
Introduction of the subject
With now over a billion Facebook users (Lee et al., 2014), it is undeniable that social media play an important part in the daily lives of people around the world. Companies can also be part of that space and are able to reach customers and shareholders through their own social space at possibly any time on any laptop, phone, tablet, or normal computer at home with an online connection. Because social media are developing themselves constantly at a rapid speed, companies have to be innovative to keep up with these developments in order to hold and expand its reach (Kaplan & Haenlein, 2010), conversion, right targeting, return on investment, relevance, quality, and engagement. However, little research has been carried out yet which strives to map the use of social media platforms by companies over time. Especially the question how organizations have learned from these experiences and how this has influenced the current social media use and plans for the future is yet to be discovered. One main reason for this could possibly be that much academic literature has treated social media as a new phenomenon for a long time, which it certainly isn’t anymore; over the past ten years, many organizations have experienced heavily with social media and have included it in their official policies. In other words, organizations are way behind the era of Hyves and Myspace and have entered a new generation, where organizations actually are experienced with social media. Companies in turn have certain goals to accomplish on social media in order to meet their return on investment. Some of these companies are being recognized by social media users, have a strong reputation on a certain social media platform, and have to continuously expand their amount of positive relationships with other social media users. From a holistic point of view, platforms like Facebook and Twitter have become ubiquitous to such an extent for instance, that it could be assumed a company needs to profile itself there if only in order to legitimize itself in a digital environment.
The importance of companies on social media
More and more companies are to be found with their own space on Facebook, Twitter, and any of the social networking sites which currently define the field. The importance for companies to communicate on these networks is crucial since it can enable a wide sphere of influence when combined with traditional media (Hanna et al., 2011). Therefore, companies on social media have certain goals to fulfill, such as generating sales, increase dialogue with their shareholders, and above all make social media users spread the names of these companies over their own networks.
4 Introducing social media developing over time
In time, there have been many social networking platforms which were either fashionable during a certain timeframe, innovators in the field, in line of another platform or consequently adapted to fit a certain kind of users (Hughes et al., 2011). Myspace for instance was a social networking platform which was used primarily before the advent of Facebook, whilst Twitter brought a whole new way of social networking that introduced the term ‘tweeting’ for instance. Google+ is seen by many as a similar social media tool as Facebook, although more mindful towards one’s privacy when sharing information (Ovadia, 2011). There are also platforms which are now seen as obsolete but which formed the landscape of social media to a large extent; Myspace was a known platform where especially music fans were geared before the advent of platforms such as YouTube, Spotify, and iTunes, whilst Second Life took a maybe too large step in creating a virtual world as identical to ours it could be at the time. All these social media therefore have something to offer and their own characteristics to fit companies.
How companies need to react to the development of social media
As time progresses social media platforms are developed through monitoring the advance of today’s technology and needs of social media users. If social media are a source of possibilities for companies, it seems to require the development of a strategic social media plan inside its organization to ensure a strong position in this field; this is not only focused on how social media platforms are developing in time, but also on how companies themselves change and interact with these platforms. This creates a process where changing social media platforms change organizations constantly, ultimately developing an overall picture of how and to what degree a company needs to invest in their presence on social media.
How companies react to new social media platforms
When new platforms are adopted it can create benefits for companies just as much as risks. Early adoption in social media technologies can bring a certain advantage when the companies are the first to use these as a base for maintaining and generating new customer relationships, and have a competitive advantage against rivaling companies (Kumar et al., 2011). However, the infancy and yet unknown growth of presence and reach of new platforms are factors which can put the company’s investment at risk. If a novel social media platform fails to catch on with the audience, or the company simply fails to profile itself correctly on the platform, it runs in danger of failing to retrieve the return of investment. This also calls for keeping watch on new developments in social media and new platforms which can be apt for targeting audiences.
5 The academic discussion on social media
The newest social media platforms have currently been discussed very little in academic literature, with exceptions from the likes of Church and de Oliveira who studied the differences between WhatsApp and traditional social media, and Poltash who studied the links between Snapchat and sexting (Church and de Oliveira, 2013: Poltash, 2013). This does not take away from the fact that until recently, academics still treated social media platforms as a new phenomenon or a very recent development in new media. This article argues that social media are not new anymore and aims to show that organizations have a history with many types of social media platforms over a number of years in which the rapid development has demanded a constant focus. The article also aims to show that the organizational use of social media isn’t a new phenomenon and in many cases has not been practiced for more than years; longer is often exceptional. What is striking here is that the rapid development of social media can create an abundant history in relatively little time.
Justification of study
This study focuses on the process of the use of social media over a longer period of time and what organizations learn from it. This process encompasses taking all that historically happened and encode it into strategic planning that guide a company’s behavior towards this process (Levitt & March, 1988). To capture this process, it is essential to look back in time in order to map a company’s moves by looking at investments onto social media platforms and decide whether these moves were a success or not. Then companies can decide upon innovation of their strategies on social media and further course of action. This is being done through the process of justification, where companies try to justify their current actions based on experiences with social media platforms which were used in the past. (Staw et al., 1983) In this light, making sense (Weick, 1993) of these outcomes can be a driving force behind getting a maximum return on investment out of social media use by companies. Thus, the process of strategic social media planning whilst profiling themselves on social media could make the difference between succeeding or failing on these platforms. Furthermore, although much academic literature has been published on organizational learning, sensemaking, attribution and justification theory (Weick, 1993: Weiner, 1972: Botanski & Thévenot, 1999), these have not yet been studied against the process of getting returns on investment through social media by companies.
Aim of study
This study aims to look into how organizations decide upon adopting social media platforms and how they develop their own specific strategic social media planning for getting a maximum return on investment through organizational learning. Through a series of interviews with professionals
6 responsible for social media activities concerned with the marketing activities of their company, it aims to look at two main processes. It first looks at how companies have dealt with both positive and negative experiences with social media in the past and what was learned from these through sensemaking. The second process looks at how they have taken this experience with them today, and how they use this knowledge for strategic planning of social media communication through attribution and justification to maximize their return on investment. Social media may be inherent to a certain timeframe, but its use and how it internally shapes companies over the years could show a reciprocal process where organizations shape social media just like social media shape them. By looking into these processes, this study aims to deliver substantial worth to the mapping of companies tackling social media over the years from where it is headed based on what has been learned in the past.
Method of study
Through qualitative analysis the study aims to discover patterns of how the adoption, use and abolishment of social media platforms came into being. Mapping these reasons is believed to contribute substantially to academic literature for two reasons: 1) to show how sensemaking in companies developed to instigate investments in these kind of social media projects and 2) how its effect afterwards were both dealt with and whether it affected the strategic planning of social media communication in any way. Furthermore, as a qualitative study looking into different timeframes, its results will be supported by using sensitizing concepts to adequately generate a substantial theory concerning the subject matter. In the following study these concepts shall be used as interpretations of the gathered qualitative data; through coding of the core concepts emerging from the conducted interviews, a theoretical framework is expected to emerge for describing the process of internal communication regarding social media activities.
Framework of study
First, this study shall review literature concerning earlier research on the use of social media and companies, and review theory concerning organizational learning, sensemaking, and sensitizing concepts. Second, the methods for interviewing of the relevant people of the companies chosen for this study shall be discussed and how the interviews were coded. Third, these findings shall be presented and discussed in light of the earlier reviewed literature and concepts. Finally, managerial implications shall be discussed, including limitations of the study and areas for future research.
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Literature review
Introduction
This study is explorative; hence it is aimed at discovering new theory which is expected to emerge from the data and its analysis. However, to sustain this and have a starting angle, the following section shall discuss certain sensitizing concepts from which the data shall be analyzed and be mirrored with the study’s results. These resources are all related to the previously discussed framework of the study and can be either enriched, discarded, or confirmed after the analysis of the data.
Sensitizing concepts and grounded theory
Since social media are rapidly changing and organizations have to adapt to these changes constantly, developing fixed concepts in this study would be futile. Instead, using sensitizing concepts will give way to constant refinement of the study, in this case the process of strategic planning of social media use in organizations over time. Organizational learning for instance, which shall be discussed further down, is a continuous process which calls for what Blumer called apt illustrations to grasp the reference in term of one’s own experience (Blumer, 1954). In this case, the interview data shall give a current insight into a process through the experience of various communication professionals into concepts which are subject to change.
This calls for mapping specific features of social interaction and for providing guidelines for research in specific settings (Bowen, 2008). Charmaz (2008) described Grounded Theory as a research approach which is inductive, emergent, and open-ended. Since the study is focusing on many types of companies which all employ different tactics towards social media, the concepts of grounded theory and sensitizing concepts can be used to find a middle ground where equal patterns are expected to emerge. Eventual varying understandings of certain concepts which is subject to the nature of an organization will of course not be excluded from this middle ground if it appears substantial, but the main aim is to find reflecting patterns in social media use by organizations over time. As Selden noted, grounded theory should be pragmatically oriented, and this study as well will serve to be practically useful by sticking close to a practical, empirical reality (Selden, 2005).
Early adoption of technology
This study aims to explore as well how the adoption of a social media platform can turn out for organizations. Many studies argue that early adoption to an innovation increases an organization’s flow of profits (Fudenberg and Tirole, 1995) or competitive advantage (Burkhardt & Brass, 1990), but the earlier this is adopted the more risky it is (Bauer and Hein, 2006). They also argue that
8 organizations use early adoption as ‘preemptive adoption’, where they are trying to adopt a new technology sooner than their rivals to prevent or delay their adoption (Fudenberg and Tirole, 1985). Indeed, early adoption requires investment into a new development which has not been explored yet, and is therefore harder to conduct a fully targeted strategy on than established developments. It is then the question whether it is desirable in light of beating an organization’s rivals by early adapting and hopefully excelling at this before the rivals do. Attewell warns here that two processes are at work: One is of signaling, which is the communication of the existence and potential gains of a new development. In this sense, it is the communication professionals finding new social media platforms and discovering ways to use these to the advantage of their organization through their professional expertise. The other is know-how or technical knowledge, which is the ability to use a new innovation (Attewell, 1992). Signaling requires the adequate expertise of social media managers to follow trends amongst the platforms, and then it is crucial that know-how and technical knowledge of the platform’s use is institutionalized as soon as possible. Hastening any of these two processes could result in signaling the wrong platforms to adapt to and in the second case of having inadequate knowledge to use these platforms. Both scenarios would risk the made investments for being early adopters, which in turn would endanger the flow of profits. It is therefore wishful to see how organizations find early adoption amongst social media useful and how this is practiced. Micahelidou expected for example that small and medium sized companies (SME’s) are expected to be earlier adopters of social media than large companies, since they are more innovative (Micahelidou, 2011). This study aims to confirm this. As a controlling factor however, has Wozniak shown in a study that larger companies are more likely to be amongst early adopters because of their production size (Wozniak, 1987). This was not measured in relation to social media however, but is still a considerate factor. Furthermore have Perrigot et al. (2012) investigated into organizations and the early adoption of Facebook in French franchises, which yielded a positive outcome but which was focused solely on Facebook. This study aims to have a broader scope on early adoption with more social media platforms over time. It should also be noted that early adoption and organizational learning are complementary to each other, where exploring new knowledge was shown to create a competitive advantage for organizations (March, 1991).
Although the scope of organizations of this study is broad, one main central element is that early adoption and social media seem to call for one very important ingredient which is intuition. Social media intuition seems to signal more than simply early adoption in social media. It is not simply a matter in the social media landscape of being ahead of the game, but of creating new ways of marketing which sustain this landscape. Therefore, the term intuition is more apt to describe this process than early adoption which is more focused on the flow of profits and competitive advantage (Fudenberg and Tirole, 1995; Burkhardt & Brass, 1990).
9 Sensemaking
When organizations have adopted social media in an early stage, they have to evaluate these media over time and review the turnout of events. This happens in a process called sensemaking in organizations, which was most notably documented by Weick. In 1993 he studied the case of a forest fire disaster called the Mann Gulch disaster in the United States, where 13 men died. He studied how this could happen by analyzing which organizations were responsible. In this study, he coined sensemaking as ‘an ongoing accomplishment that emerges from efforts to create order and make retrospective sense of what occurs’ (Weick, 1993, p. 635). Therefore, sensemaking for organizations that use social media would entail creating a plan towards these social media tailored to their goals, whilst this plan is being reviewed continuously in light of what happens on these social media. Since social media are a new area of expertise for many organizations, there is no old formula to fall back on but only the option to make sense out of their previous efforts in order to make sense. As Weick put it: ‘The world of decision making is about strategic rationality. (…) The world of sensemaking is different. Sensemaking is about contextual rationality.’ (Weick, 1993, p. 636). This contextual rationality can in this case be attributed to a rapidly changing environment of social media innovations and platforms which continually demands a different strategy when these changes take place. This study shall therefore take the process of sensemaking as what Maitlis and Sonseshein described as developing plausible meanings by bracketing cues from the (social media) environment and interpret these cues on salient frames (Maitlis and Soneshein, 2010). Another important question whether investments into social media have led to a Return on Investment (ROI). The question whether economic resources or contents and ideas are more essential is interesting to analyze, especially when looking at various sizes of companies and how the social media departments are organized (Lloret Romero, 2011). It can be very well true that smaller organizations with smaller economic resources tend to probe both more creative content and business strategies, whereas larger companies with a bigger budget have a more strict code of conduct to guarantee their ROI on social media.
One of the first steps in sensemaking is analyzing why certain incidents occur. For instance, a social media campaign can lack its desired effect, the user reach can become stale or dwindle, or social media users are simply unable to find an organization on a certain platform. The task for a social media manager is thus to find out the cause of these kind of problems, a phenomenon which is linked to attribution theory. Originally theorized in 1972 by Weiner, attribution theory investigates this particular causality, or why certain incidents occur (Weiner, 1972). The original paper applied attribution theory to the educational process, and it is exactly this what social media managers face when incidents in their social media use occur; find the cause of the problem of their social media use and being able to overcome this. Attribution theory takes both failing and succeeding at this as a
10 central tenet, but it should both lead to the same outcome; it influences performance which can lead to both continuing, changing, or aborting certain social media activities, but in the end they should enhance achievement by identifying the right causes (ibid.).
What also follows from the attribution theory, if failing was the outcome of employing social media, is criticism on where it went wrong. This is a process where the critic produces justifications for their criticism, whilst the criticized in turn is prompted to justify their criticized action. What are important here are not just the justifications for actions in the past, but coming to a state of equivalence where both the critic and the criticized try to connect by identifying their situations (Boltanski & Thévenot, 1999). This of course does not have to generate full agreement between the critic and the criticized; Patriotta et al. show for instance by a study of a nuclear accident that justification is made rather by stakeholders through multiple forms of agreement to repair or maintain legitimacy (Patriotta et al., 2011). For organizations this means that justification for a failure related to social media does not necessarily have to be attributed to their course of action, but can also be used to legitimize the organization itself. Phelan and Rudman discuss the concept of system justification for instance, where humans are motivated to see the system around them as legitimate and fair, because from a subjective point of view they want to see the world they live in as legitimate and fair (Phelan and Rudman, 2011). Therefore, it is possible that to justify criticism, organizations would rather use this system justification to legitimize themselves rather than to give in to their failure and risk damage of reputation. This study therefore also tries to identify how companies deal with miscalculations in conducting social media practices, and how these were justified. An important factor here is who organizations blame in these cases, such as itself, the social media platform, or even the users.
Organizational learning
Besides attributing causes and justifying courses of action, a possible outcome of sensemaking could be organizational learning. After all, when accomplishments or mistakes are made which are subsequently attributed and justified in the most adequate manner an organization sees fit, it should be crucial to the legitimacy of the organization and its social media use to take these experiences to the next venture and learn from these. Coined by Levitt and March, they described organizational learning as ‘learning by encoding inferences from history into routines that guide behavior.’ (Levitt and March, 1988, p. 320) Indeed, it is this history that keeps on being internalized and refined into new and adjusted routines which are created in order to avoid further pitfalls in social media. However, because of the quick development of social media, organizational learning is expected to remain present during an organization’s use. Argote (2012) also pointed out that large increases in productivity usually occurred as organizations gained new experience through organizational
11 learning (Argote, 2102). This means that when an organization could be triggered to stay better informed about new developments in social media, its productivity around it could notably increase. Other studies noted that inside organizations certain communities are present who gained their own insights from working individually from the canonical codes from the organization itself. (Brown and Duiguid, 1991; March, 1991). This points out that it could not just be the organization as a whole that is involved in organizational learning, but rather the departments who conduct the social media who have their own roles of conduct. For this study, there shall be looked into whether organizations are using social media from a strict company policy, or through a more loose policy where the social media managers themselves have the freedom to learn inside their own community of expertise.
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Method
Design
The main reason for using sensitizing concepts in this study is that the subject of social media in the context of organizations over time is a new field of study. To answer the research question of this study according to these concepts, semi-structured interviews were conducted with communication professionals who are either responsible for the conduct of social media practices of their company, or are heavily involved in managing these.
Sampling
The main requirement for the respondents to partake in these interviews was that they were involved in managing the social media of companies for longer than a year, wherein they have experienced the changes in use of the social media platforms and were involved in its decision making. All respondents are active in Dutch companies except for one who is active in Ireland, where the nature of the company was freely chosen except that they should use social media to enlarge the return on investment. The total number of interviewed professionals was 17 where from 53% was female.
Procedure
The respondents were selected on the basis of their profiles on the social media platform LinkedIn, and invited through e-mail to partake in an interview at their company. It was explained that the goal of the research was to map the use of social media of companies to see how they could profit best from these. The importance of the return of investment factor was stressed as well. In return for their effort, a management summary was offered to them in which they could find the results of this research to give their companies insight into social media experiences from the past. It was stated that one interview would take up one to one and a half hour and would be recorded by a voice recorder for data analysis. Their anonymity was strictly guaranteed.
Each respondent was then called a few days later where they could answer questions and arrange a time and date for an interview. Respondents who declined were thanked for their time and consequently removed from the respondents list. Respondents who accepted were visited at a date and time to their agreement and at their company. There the respondents were thanked for their participation and shortly briefed again about the purpose of the interview in how their co-operation would serve this research. The interview was structured in three parts to chronologically serve the purposes of this research, where the first part concerned the company’s use of social media in the past, the second part looked at current perspectives on their social media use in the past, and the
13 third part concerned how they currently use social media platforms and what future developments their company has planned. Each part had a substructure of questions where different aspects were asked and eventually certain interesting responses were elaborated upon while other questions were asked twice if the answer did not fit the desired response.
The first part of an interview concerned a retrospective view on social media use and asked the respondents as a main question when their company first became active on social media, and how this process developed itself. Questions that were probing further into this matter where what social media platforms they had used in the past, whether they were one of the first ones to use these, what their most important motives were to use these, and whether they still used these and why. The respondents were also asked to describe the decision making concerning the eventual continuation of social media activities. The second part aimed itself at how the company is now looking back on the social media use in the past and whether it is being regarded as successful. Further questions which were probing further into the matter were what influence this had on their company, whether the project is still discussed sometimes and how, and what the company has learned from these experiences. The third and final part was without a main question but instead split up in three consecutive parts, where the first asked the respondent what social media where used now at their company and how, the second one asked whether they thought the past social media use had any influence on their current social media use and how, and the third asked what plans for the future they had with social media use and what these were. Especially in the second part here was probed for into detail since it concerned a very important aspect of the research, where it explains how their past use and current use of social media is influencing each other. After asking all questions and asking additional ones if it was felt that certain given answers were not yet satisfying for use in this research, the respondents were thanked for their participation and promised to be sent the management summary as soon as the results of the analysis were completed.
Data analysis and coding
To analyze the data, all interviews were first transcribed verbatim. The transcribed interviews were analyzed during and after transcription, using ATLAS.ti software to code the interviews by looking for the proposed processes of organizational learning when using social media platforms, in this case sensemaking, attribution, and justification. Further interesting and unexpected findings alongside the hypothesized concepts were analyzed alongside. All these answers were then compared and looked upon for similarities in the practiced decisions by the communication professionals. Consequently these were connected in order to find new or similar phenomena which served these processes and were assembled in its right category. These categories were used to sustain the sensitizing concepts which could illuminate the workings of organizational learning in connection to social media. Any
14 discrepancies during this coding process through incomplete concepts were solved by further additional coding until these were solved. This in turn generated support for the sensitizing concepts in the earlier reviewed literature to connect these with organizational learning in social media use by organizations. The results of this process are further discussed below.
Table 1. Overview of respondents by industry, function, gender, and size.
Industry Function Gender Size*
A National newspaper Social media manager Female Large
B Media launching company Social media brand specialist
Male SME
C Insurance company Social media manager Male Large
D National newspaper Web editor Female Large
E Bank Dialogue manager Male Large
F Software startup company Digital marketer Female Large
G Railway company Online reputation manager
Male Large
H General interests magazine Editor Male SME
I Food industry agency Manager Marketing and communication / Marketing & communication
Male / Female SME
J Bank Social media manager Male Large
K Mortgage advice agency Content marketeer / Content marketeer
Female / Female SME
L Workplace creation agency Community and social media
communication
Male Large
M Social media advice agency Owner Female SME
N Lifestyle magazine Marketeer Female Large
O National broadcasting organization
Social media coordinator
Female Large
*This classification was based on the average number of employees at a company, where SME (Small and Medium sized Enterprises) indicates organizations < 250 employees, and large organizations > 250 employees.
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Results
The interviews provided a coherent framework of the state of social media inside both small and large organizations over time. This included their very beginnings in social media, which lead to their current state, which then in turn gave a conceptual idea of the future. The following section shall discuss the main findings and implications of these interviews through examples found in the conducted interviews. A general overview of social media use is discussed first, after which adoption, sensemaking through different kinds of media, and strategies are discussed in light of the conducted interviews and how these were formed.
Social media use
Social media use started to emerge around 2001 or 2002. Social media use by organizations has also been around for a relatively long time, it could be said that most participants were active on social media at the end of last decade. The social media manager from a major insurance company who was interviewed is one example: ‘Now I think, let’s say, that the last five years there really has been invested into social. So I think from 2009, it has become a subject on the marketing and communication agenda. That’s how you could look at it, and it was being done before that but it wasn’t invested somewhere.’ This last sentence also points out, that social media was practiced but mostly not on a full-time basis and alongside another function employees carried out.
However, the time that social media has been implemented into organizations as an independent, professional unit of organizations seems much shorter. Most organizations have not had social media as part of their official company policy since 2010 or 2011. The online reputation manager of a railway company highlights this: ‘(…) since March the 29th 2010, that is when we said any way, then we choose to become active on Twitter, and with that we opened ourselves up as an organization to a large group of people.’ When asked about any previous activity, he answers: ‘Not from a broad perspective. Sometimes incidents, or incidents, react to a blog sometimes, or an individual who reacted on GeenStijl (an online Dutch news platform), or you know. But not operating from a strategic point of view as we have been doing since March 2010.’
The core business of the organization here impacts these findings; four organizations have social media as their core business, and thus have professionalized this from the very beginning. These included the media launch company which activates brands using social media, the software startup company which basically advices companies about social media in a Business to Business (B2B) fashion, the workplace creation agency which functions through social media only, and the social media advice agency where advising about social media lies at its core. It goes without saying that these four organizations have a very progressive and in-depth view on social media being it their
16 core business, and therefore are used in this research as leading examples of social media and organizational learning.
The other organizations which don’t have social media at their core can be differentiated further by their size; as shall become apparent later on, small organizations tend to use social media differently than larger organizations. This is further determined by the age of the organization and again their core business. Organizations which have existed for a longer amount of time tend to know their business well and are less prone to major change in their conduct of business. Their core of business determines their strategy of marketing as well; if for instance their product has been straightforward; their business strategy is as well in many cases. However, many relatively old organizations create a product which isn’t in need for much innovation over time, and they are now being forced to adapt to the changes in marketing strategies created by social media. A general interests magazine which did extremely well until online content and social media emerged last decade, experienced this. Their late editor explains: ‘In de eighties, early nineties, when there was no internet yet, then the magazine was being read by men who looked for a little sensation… sex, drugs, and socialism were I think… (…) Man, that sold enormously. A 100.000 copies a week, that is a lot you know. Then there is a lot of money coming in, and then you also had the cigarette merchants advertising, such as Marlboro and that kind of brands. (…) Yes, at one point that was abolished and then the internet came, and then… it rolled right down the hill, yes.’ When social media came along, he saw a chance to make an impact on these stagnating sales: ‘(…) they didn’t want to invest in the brand no more. Because they thought in brands, they didn’t think ‘there is potential in new media to give new life to the brand’; they already kind of had given up on that.’ In the context of organizational learning, this forces organizations to explore the marketing possibilities of social media because for most of them it is getting harder to solely focus on traditional media forms to promote their product, such as television, print, billboards, and an online presence through a website. Most of the organizations experienced these explorations through trial and error.
The names of functions of the interviewees often had the term ‘social media’ already stated in them; examples were social media manager, social media brand manager, community and social media communication, and social media coordinator. If the functions were named different, they either had to do with marketing, communication, or online business. These included web editor, dialogue manager, digital marketer, online reputation manager, editor, manager marketing and communication, content marketer, owner, and marketer. Some of the interviewees told a little about their job before their current function, such as the marketer of a lifestyle magazine; ‘Well, before (…) I worked at a media agency and had a marketing function there, and at that agency I really sat with Facebook around the table, and Google. We worked for big advertisers who were active on social media for a long period of time, so I was hired as a marketer with an online focus, as in an online
17 marketer.’ It is noticeable that most interviewees already had previous experience in working with social media, just like the social media coordinator of a national broadcasting organization; ‘(…) I also worked for commercial companies(…) there you got as targets things like ‘social traffic from Twitter must rise with so many percent (…) there were real KPI’s attached to that’.
The type of organizations reviewed in this study varies considerably in nature, which of course provided many views on how social media can be used for maximizing their business. This also means that one solution for an organization conducting social media isn’t necessarily applicable to another, especially when factors such as size and core of business are held in regard. However, it also showed that many organizations that do succeed in their social media use did so by employing strategies which can be applicable to organizations that vastly differ in age and core business. The following concepts are aimed at showing these strategies.
Early adoption
The following section shall give some key examples of both small and large organizations and which give their own vision on how early adoption on social media determined their current and future use. The aspect of adoption is often not seen at the surface; as the web editor of a national Dutch newspaper noted, being as one of the first newspapers on Twitter in the country was not based on any intuitive desire. ‘You just put love into it and we liked it very much and found it useful. And this worked in multiple directions, you know, first as a source, than as a channel.’ This was before it was put on their official agenda, let alone before it was made part of the organization’s policy. ‘(…) that we officially established the channel, this is kind of a logistic thing since you need to free up a lot of time and space, which can’t lie with only one person. So the decision came a little later, I think it was 2009 or such.’ This shows that experimenting with social media is a prerequisite rather than a full on immersion onto a platform which also bears nothing for being intuitive.
But how risky is employing early adoption with social media for a company? The owner of a social media advice agency and author of various books on social media shed more light on the subjects of risk of investments and reputation when she started out on using Twitter in her company in 2007. She highlights some through her early adoption of Twitter some specific benefits and characteristics of social media: ‘No, something like Twitter doesn’t feel risky. I think that an entrepreneur will start to see a risk when something very serious happens on grounds of reputation, or on investment type of circumstances. (…) And that is the same for Twitter; (…) when you start speaking, sending, writing, you have to think about this. (…) And yes financially, it was free. It is free. So yes, risky? No.’ Of course, this shows that innovation on a new platform is possible since organizations still have a chance to be noticed, without having to invest in advertising on a platform in order to get noticed in the crowd. This is a matter which she also addressed: ‘And you have to
18 expect whether Facebook is prepared to show your message on a timeline of someone, despite the fact that person liked it. And that is not pleasurable, because that means they have all the power and we don’t, while we deliver the content’. The risk of investment into social media shall be further discussed in sensemaking below.
While looking at the process of early adoption, some key factors have to be held in regard here: the size of a company as lined out in Table 1 indicates the size at the time of interviewing. However, at the time early adoption was practiced by organizations, their size in many cases was different; some were a SME and became a large enterprise. Therefore, the ratios in this section differ in this respect to those shown in Table 1. At the time of early adoption of social media 7 of the investigated organizations were classified as large, and 4 of these indicated they were early adopters in the field. In contrast, 8 of the organizations were SME’s and 4 of them indicated they were early adopters. This shows a slight advantage of large organizations over SME’s in early adoption, but of course the difference is marginal.
Large organizations. The following examples extracted from the conducted interviews are aimed at giving more insight into signaling innovations and technical knowledge of how to make these innovations concrete (Attewell, 1992), and how strategies are being employed. Some of these large organizations had to innovate in social media because of a need for providing webcare, such as banks. The dialogue manager of a major national Dutch bank declared ‘(…) we especially have to listen to our customers. Our customers have (…) online questions and ask them to each other, or on Twitter; we have to answer these. It’s that simple’. The social media manager of another major bank underscored this; ‘(…) we are a service provider, and we want to be where our customers are, or our future customers.’ This is more a matter of having to innovate in the field of social media out of necessity rather than trying to experiment with a field of business on social media. Just like a railway company, this line of companies go where the customer is to initiate a dialogue, as according to their online reputation manager; ‘(…) if you want to keep the conversation going, and you want to be in charge of this, then you have to be there where they talk about you the most. And that was Twitter.’ Of course, these are all examples of large organizations which have a bigger need for representing their many customers than SME. For the latter, which still has to reach out more for clientele, innovation can be a potential game-changer.
SME’s. The digital marketer of which first was a small Irish SME but now a global software startup company, saw the early adoption as a chance for its founders to do something radical: ‘(…) some of the guys got together, and they just recognized an opportunity in the market, so they recognized that the traditional way of marketing that was being done, was just broken. (…) And they kind of wanted something where their message wasn’t pushed out, not to the masses, but they wanted to provide helpful, valuable content to people at the right time for them to consume.’ The
19 whole model instigated here refers to inbound marketing which is further discussed below. The innovation here was to learn the social media channels and help other organizations to learn these before they lost their niche and novelty. In that way, organizations could stay ahead of the game by deploying themselves in social media channels tailored to their identity. More SME’s have used early adoption to initiate innovation and break through traditional ways of marketing as was shown in this example. A community and social media manager from a workplace creation agency took the opportunity to create their own social network to build a bridge between LinkedIn and Facebook around 2008, to fulfill the needs of their company. As he stated: ‘(…) Facebook, then very social, and LinkedIn very business, we wanted to sit between these (…) And there we ultimately brought around a 110 to 120.000 people together who could form groups, organize events, and that kind of business.’ Of course, LinkedIn and Facebook then were hardly used by most organizations at all, and the concept of having one’s own social network for an organization shall be discussed later. Both examples however, are also prime examples of signaling innovations and having the technical knowledge as Attewell posed in 1992 in relation to social media.
Sensemaking
There are many more factors to consider when trying developing as an organization onto social media. Especially new organizations are prone to failing at succeeding in some of these media before they learn themselves how to become more resourceful in the social media landscape. This can have a reversed effect as well; social media platforms can over time cease to serve the needs of an organization. First, social media platforms could obtain a different scope as the owner of the social media advice agency points out; ‘Facebook filters (content), Google doesn’t do that. And Twitter doesn’t do that either (…) And I think that’s a pity, and that’s why I think there’s room for a Facebook number 2’. Second, it could grow beyond its capacity so organizations would be hard to find or get noticed with their marketing campaigns, such as the digital marker at the software startup agency noticed; ‘Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, LinkedIn, they’re all kind of going towards a more paid advertising route at the moment. So there’s less opportunity there for the smaller business to break through.’ And third, a social media platform simply could cease to exist itself, which shall become apparent soon with examples from a social media platform such as Hyves. Overcoming these processes through trial and error is a natural part of organizational learning which encompasses a process called sensemaking. Through sensemaking an organization learns by looking at attributing causes and how these were justified. On the basis of these outcomes, organizations can review their past experience with social media platforms in retrospect and review their use in the light of staying with a platform or moving on. The latest social media platforms are the most notable where sensemaking is employed since it is in many cases a new platform of expertise for organizations,
20 especially when they try to be early adopters on these. This section shall therefore discuss some main findings concerning organizations and sensemaking based on certain social media platforms.
Hyves. It has been noticed that many interviewees who were early adopters on social media, have been active on platforms which either ceased to exist or where they migrated away from themselves, although they put high stakes on these. Therefore a lot of interviewees were asked about their experiences with early media platforms. A social media manager from a national newspaper told about leaving Hyves, a major Dutch online social media platform in the first decade of this century which ceased at the decade’s end: ‘The social media editor, the first one we’ve had, so who started before me, he has done things with that. But that has been let go off quite soon, because not much happened there, there’s wasn’t much engagement’. She later adds: ‘I think also that Hyves was more about persons than Facebook is now, for example. Because it’s much more commercial’. Indeed, Hyves was more of a niche platform which was mainly used in the Netherlands, and therefore more intimate. The digital marketer from the software startup company who is from Ireland, signaled these sorts of platforms as well, and even sees them making a comeback: ‘Bebo would be an Irish social media channel that has been largely obsolete and us now coming back into use again…’ When asked how this happened, she replied: ‘I think people just migrated over to Facebook at one stage, and they were the kind of dominating social media. And now it’s kind of mainstream to be on Facebook, and people are looking for an alternative social media platform, and they’re kind of steering away from that and are trying something new. But it’s more niche in its approach, so…’ Although Hyves does not exist anymore as Bebo does, more niche and targeted platforms are becoming more ubiquitous, and this shall be discussed further on.
Second Life. Another social media platform which was very popular for a very short time was Second Life, a platform where users could roam around in a virtual 3D world and live exactly as they did in the real world, with a home, relationship, job, and even having its own currency. The social media manager of a major insurance company tells about their involvement at the time: ‘(…) that has been a mistake because we invested too much in it. That ultimately didn’t pay itself back. Oh well, you can make that kind of mistakes too, yes.’ Later on he adds: ‘(…) we then apparently took a risk by doing that, fine. You know, if that then looked like a responsible risk, which I assume, of course then that’s not so bad at all. (…) now sometimes investments are being asked for a certain kind of platform, and then you have to think very hard about this whether you want it or not. And how that is going to pay itself, those are just business technical risks you run.’ In this light of sensemaking, a failed investment onto a social media platform is a risk an organization must take, but it should obviously have the capacity to run this kind of risk. For a SME, risking these kind of investments can be catastrophic, and therefore are better off in doing proper research in what social media tailors them best. This failed investment is further justified by using risk as being a central part of sensemaking,
21 which in the end proved to be a good thing for the insurance company since they now think harder about wanting to adopt new social media platforms.
Facebook. Targeting at social media is another area where sensemaking is employed. At a national broadcasting organization in the Netherlands, a social media coordinator shares one these experiences of trying to target the right audience for a social media channel: ‘Take youth for example where we had a show for lately. That’s a real life show about students from a dance school in Amsterdam, so it was scripted reality and… yes, 16 until 20, we had some Facebook with that, but we quickly noticed in that target group we didn’t get much success there anymore. Now for example we are working on another show, which is for the target group 30-60, about crime in the Netherlands and where the country is going. (…) well, we notice there that Facebook is doing extremely well.’ This example shows that audiences on social media platform shift, and in this example the youth is migrating from Facebook, a platform once dominated by youth, to different ones. The community and marketing communicator from the workplace creation agency signals a full shift in this respect: ‘I really have the feeling that everything is telling you that a certain amount of social networks have come into a next cycle… intuitively, because all the youth is going towards Instagram, or Snapchat and that kind of things, right? So it’s scattering very much.’ These examples signal an ongoing shift where organizations make sense from in retrospect; by trial and error they learn from certain campaigns aimed at targeting groups.
Strategies
Now that targeting has been shown from the perspective of sensemaking, it is important to understand how communication professionals strategize targeting. One of the observations was that social media users tend to migrate to different, more targeted and niche platforms which are tailored to personal interests. Both organizations and users have their reasons for this. One of the main reasons for organizations is the inability to get noticed since certain platforms have grown beyond their proportions. A social media brand specialist from a media launching company, an avid Twitter user, confirms this; ‘Updates always arrive on Twitter first (…) but you do notice there that we (…) constantly try to determine a new standard there. But it constantly shifts heavily. And the amount of posts for example the last, year and a half or such, has increased immensely. So to be seen and get your message across on your channel… it’s difficult, very difficult.’ Both Twitter and Facebook were found indeed to be the two most used social media platforms amongst the interviewed organizations. Social media managers also express this concern about Facebook and advertising, as the social media manger of a major national bank did; ‘When I started in 2012 we had an organic reach of our messages from around 80%, so if we posted something 80% of our followers saw that. Now only 3 or 4% sees this, and the rest we have to buy sponsored, for that reach really. So it costs you a couple of
22 100 euro’s more to show your message to all your followers. (…) And I understand that from their point of view, right? (…) But we have to ask ourselves what that means for us, do we really want to invest money in that, couldn’t we rather e-mail, or do better business on our site?’ An important mechanism is seen at work here: When social media platforms grow so large that users can’t reach all of their followers anymore, organizations can make additional investments to still do so. That this is not necessarily desirable is evident, for users as well, as the social media brand specialist at the media launching company states; ‘(…) that pressure to have everything, everywhere, I think that’s kind of on the way out,. And that there’s a lot of annoyance amongst those who don’t want that anymore. So you’re like ‘that tsunami of content, all day, I don’t want that anymore, clear off.’’ Targeting again plays a very large role here; a social media platform such as Facebook used to be dominated by the younger users, but the earlier example from the broadcasting organization and the Facebook campaign shows that this is shifting. The dialogue manager from a bank confirms; ‘(…) what you also see, for youngsters it isn’t the platform anymore. They are more to be found on Instagram and Snapchat.’ This underscores again that it is essential not only to know where the targets of an organization are to be found, but also where they are going. An interesting notion came from the digital marketer from the software startup company on how to still try to rise above the saturation on the main social media platforms; ‘(…) in order to do that, you need to have even better quality content to be produced. You don’t have to just send out messages at Facebook on a daily basis, it won’t get you anywhere. You need the best quality content out there. Treat your audience in the best way, you really have to stand out with your visuals, videos… make something unique. Different, remarkable content is what’s going to really win out.’
Remarkably, the organizations who have social media as their core business, also plead for different and new ways of marketing on social media which are more tailored to the nature of social media and specific features it has to offer. In the early adoption section the digital marketer from the software startup company already mentioned the use and support of inbound marketing where the focus lies on social instead of strictly financial capital, and more participants sustained this. This is a strategy where helping customers has a main priority instead of straight selling. The content marketer of an online mortgage advice agency supports this method; ‘For a while we kept an eye on hashtags through Twitter, and if people for example went to buy or look at houses, or were looking for a mortgage, we answered them in the form of content. So more information and offering help, no selling, not at all. (…) And you get very positive reactions on this, often it is ‘oh thanks, how nice’, or a follow-up question, so that’s very good’. However, she also expresses trouble with this method; ‘The only thing was, we never took these people by the hand and kept them close to us. So we noticed the appreciation, really good, but once again; short on time.’ The lessened priority on social media activities here is holding this company back to explore inbound marketing on an adequate level. Why
23 this is very important, the digital marketer of the software startup company again explains; ‘(…) we’re very focused on LTV, which is Life Time Value of a customer. (…( So basically a company buys (our company) and pays for it every month. So if they stop after 6 months that’s really bad for us, we want a customer to be with us for 10 or 15 years.’ To achieve this LTV of a customer, the owner of a social media advice agency argues that you have to help your customers acquire instead of straight selling, and she explains this through the cocktail party rule; ‘(…) you have people, probably around you, I have some anyway, and if I run into them at a party, I say hello to one, because I find that an extraordinary nice lady. But what she does is stand around all night talking about herself. Companies do the same on social media. And I don’t think it’s about the companies, and many companies are still in the old economy trying to sell. And we say; help acquiring. And that’s our slogan; you have to help people!’ If we put these perspectives together, it becomes obvious that offering more help to a customer rather than push a product can create a long term partnership where an organization keeps monitoring a customer and tries to help them when they need it. The owner of the social media advice agency further explains how this is done through social media; ‘So from the five Twitter messages, to make it very concrete, four of them are nice, or informative, or analytic, or a piece of research, to help people. And the fifth, that is the piece where you say ‘Hey look, this is us. Will you come join our workshop? Do you want to download a white paper?’ And that’s still helping’. What is practiced here to its extreme is the first word of the term social media, which is being social. What inbound marketing then does is using social capital as a main tool to drive financial capital as well, but not as a main goal. The owner highlights the long term aspect of inbound marketing as well; ‘(…) we’re satisfied with a subscription, if you only stay with us for a long time. And in that we want to grow. We do grow in the long term, but we won’t grow very much at once.’ One of the participants who has spent most of his time bringing this marketing strategy to perfection at his organization, has used inbound marketing for letting his customers pay with mainly their own knowledge and advice to other people working at his workplace creation spots in order for them to get a workplace. Through their own social network, people can find other people at these workplaces to give them measured advice based on their profile and vice versa. He even kind of scorns the word inbound marketing when he was asked about the risk of relying on social capital which is hard to measure: ‘(…) you partially use your senses. And you have no clear ROI of social capital, which is I think still the holy grail of the internet. And that’s what they call inbound marketing. (…) I have to get you to say ‘last time I was at your company and it was fantastic.’ And not because you say that because I think you should say that, but because you experienced it yourself. That, and if you call that inbound marketing, well fine, then we have been doing that for five years now. End of discussion.’
A final strategy which deserves attention ties in with the earlier notion of mainstream social media platforms growing beyond their capacities to serve their users sufficiently to their ends. Many
24 participants of this study not only voiced their concern about this, but are also looking into taking matters into their own hands. The perspectives on how this is feasible vary. The workplace creation agency was already mentioned with having built their own social network first, and now having a network where people at their workplaces can find likeminded people to exchange advice. ‘(…) that’s exactly where we’re independent of those social networks. If so to speak tomorrow Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn shut everything down, than we just continue with what we’re doing and we can still communicate with our people; because they’re real-time around us every day, literally.’ This vision is of course in the light of freelancers in a workplace environment, but other participants in this study voiced their interest in being more independent from the mainstream social networks as well. By managing social media themselves from their own social strategy, certain benefits come to light. The online reputation manager of a railway company raises his point about the matter in this way; ‘(…) a service forum (…) is from the idea (…) that people easier and more often can retrieve something, something which is not on the website or where there’s a nuance, that there’s always service. Also the idea that a customer helps a customer; at the moment we put something on Facebook or on Twitter, you see other people interfere with the matter, and often have much more information than I, than we. (…) And that I find much more interesting than to have to think ‘yes, on which new tool do we have to focus now?’’ The idea here is to bring people together who are circled around an organization offering help to each other, whilst being independent of only social networks which would not appeal to them. Of course, this demands a large audience; ‘(…) more than half of this country is our customer, and they actually want to build with us our own platform. What are we supposed to do on Twitter with three million active Dutch people? You know, if you would do it yourself, then you’re instantly the biggest network in the country’. Of course this serves a webcare point of view for large organizations trying to serve their customers. The social media manager from a bank also supports the idea to increase dialogue with their customers over their own platform; ‘social media is about dialogue, how we can initiate more dialogue on our website without being dependent of other platforms. Because we have daily more than a million visitors on our website, so if we really want to initiate dialogue with our customers, or between them, yes. Why shouldn’t we facilitate this though our own site, or our app?’ Therefore, it seems organizations creating their own networks are more aimed at serving the customer while being independent from social media platforms, which in turn can create more bonding between the customers and the organizations themselves.
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Discussion
Organizations have embraced social media not only because they had to in this day and age to proliferate, but also to instigate new ways of doing business which were impossible before the advent of online technology and social media. On one hand it is apparent that organizations have to find their customers on the social media platform where they think they are present, but they can also become technological adopters on new platforms and invite customers by using campaigns or events. Critical mass theory (Markus, 1990) proposes that only a mass of people can critically decide upon the adoption of a new technology (Miller, 2014). This holds true for all the organizations in this study; organizations go where their customers are and when they leave a platform the organization follows.
Attewell’s theory of diffusion divides the process of adoption into signaling potential new innovations and learning skillfully to deploy on organization’s targets (Attewell, 1992). Signaling in this case could be analogous to environmental scanning as opted by Elenkov; here events and trends amongst social media users are observed by organizations to reduce strategic uncertainty (Elenkov, 1997), since it is only until certainty has been created when organizations even consider being an early adopter of social media. For many large organizations, such as banks, railroad companies, and insurance companies, their task of delivering webcare to the people in the best way possible justifies the end of the means. This is because webcare has one central goal in itself; serving customers to fulfill their needs of an organization. However, the task of signaling the right platform to approach customers to provide this webcare often remains as daunting as any organization trying to find its customers. Therefore, following the critical mass initially seems like a ‘safe bet’; most organizations simply start out on Facebook and Twitter and from there on out continue their environmental scanning to see where to possibly strike next.
Even social media can be used for signaling as well, by following the users if they leave a platform. This is not simple to do if no proper sensemaking is employed. Therefore, one of the main obstacles for organizations is finding out where their customers are going if social media platforms become too mainstream and especially crowded. A central aspect to signaling this migration is targeting, where organizations observe what kind of users leave social media platforms. Targeting inside social media is also complicated by different groups of people choosing different kinds of platforms to migrate to, which takes a higher demand on signaling as well; the mainstream social media platforms aren’t universal anymore, and every platform now gets its own target groups with their own reasons to use that certain platform. On the other hand do organizations need to recruit and train staff to keep both signaling and technical knowledge to a sufficient level if they wish to keep up with the swiftly changing technology in a fast moving domain such as social media (Kaplan
