The affordances, popularity and pervasive use of social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and Instagram have made these platforms attractive to organisations for enhancing their competitiveness and creating business value. Despite this apparent significance of social media for businesses, they are struggling with the development of a social media strategy as well as understanding the implications of social media on practice within their organisations. This paper explores how social media has become a tool for competitiveness and its influence on organisational strategy and practice. Using the 'strategy as practice' lens and guided by the interpretivist philosophy, this paper uses the empirical case of a telecom organisation in Tanzania. The findings show that social media is influencing competitiveness through imitation and product development. Also, the findings indicate how social media affects the practices within an organisation, consequently making the social media strategy an emergent phenomenon.
Social media facilitates and enhances communication between businesses and customers. Nowadays, although it is commonly recognised that companies implement social media into their marketing activities, it is also acknowledged that companies struggle to calculate the return on investment (ROI) from social media marketing efforts as most of them focus only on certain tangible outcomes such as the impact on sales and purchases. Attempts have been made by researchers to identify how to measure key impacts of social media in relation to marketing; however, there remains a lack of empirical data and no comprehensive overview of what 'ROI' can mean for an organisation seeking returns on their social media adoption. By knowing how to measure ROI from social media, companies can produce valuable insights which can help enhance marketing strategies in promoting their products/services. Thus, the aim of this chapter is to provide a review of ROI in social media marketing with a particular focus on intangible outcomes such as brand awareness, customer engagement/relationship and eWOM.
The plethora of social media platforms such as Facebook, twitter, Instagram and WhatsApp has enhanced the information systems within organisations while at the same time being a conundrum to executives, who need to develop strategy around this technology. This paper explores the influence of different social media applications on engendering strategic organisational practices using a practice perspective. Through the practice lens and with the guidance of the interpretivist philosophy, this paper collects empirical evidence from two telecom organisations in Tanzania. The findings show that different types of social media applications play different roles in engendering different strategizing methods, such as formal and informal. depending on the role the application plays. In practice, this will help organisational executives in the selection of social media applications, which is a crucial stage in the development of social media strategy.
Contemporary information technologies such as social media have brought into question the usefulness of the alignment perspective in understanding the role and influence of technology in organisational strategy. This has prompted some scholars to argue for a fusion view of Information Systems (IS) which sees IS as integral to business strategy. Despite the suggestion of the fusion view, there is little empirical evidence of how the fusion of strategy is realised. For instance, literature suggests that executives are struggling with how to implement social media strategy within an organisation. This paper uses the strategy as practice lens guided by the interpretivist philosophy to explore the influence of social media practices on the fusion of strategies within an organisation. The paper uses empirical evidence from the case study of a telecom organisation in Tanzania to gain theoretical insight into the role of social media in organisational strategy. This research contributes to the management literature by arguing that the fusion of strategy is achieved by the intertwinement of historical background, context, technological advances and social intent. Also, it contributes to IS literature by showing how social media extends the IS scope within an organisation while minimizing the need for organisational IT infrastructure. In practice, this research highlights the significance of informal social media practices such as WhatsApp communication in organisational processes such as knowledge sharing and customer service.
This short, developmental paper outlines the rationale and design of a future study relating to women's political participation on social media. The impact of social media upon women's political participation is a topic that has gained some momentum. The affordances of social media now potentially enable women to create, access and distribute content relating to political issues and participate in an online space freely. This article highlights the role that social media can play in enabling more balanced participation and also highlights that despite the potential, there is a lack of IS literature exploring women's use of social media for political participation. This article outlines the aim of the study: to explore what types of platforms women prefer to use for political participation and the factors that influence women's participation in political issues on social media. The research focuses on the case of Tanzania and proposes steps going forward.
The pervasive use of social media is influencing change within organization. This paper uses sociomaterial lens with agential view to understand how social media is reforming strategy in Telecom organization through exploring changes brought by social media to organization, evaluating the changes with selection of strategic theories as well as providing insight on adoption of social media by telecom organizations. Following an interpretivist philosophy with exploratory purpose the study uses case study methodology employing secondary data and observation to explain how social media practices are shaping strategy at Vodacom. Social media is reforming strategy within telecom industry by exerting influence on organizational process for instance product development and marketing strategy
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