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A c c e p t e d M a n u s c r i p t 2 Dr. Kafui Monu is an assistant professor of computer information systems at Savannah State University. He holds a doctoral degree from the University of British Columbia. Professor Monu's main area of research is system analysis and design, with special interest in helping developers meet user expectations through conceptual modeling. His work includes representing users' decision-making processes to system designers. Dr. Kofu's earlier work focused on disaster management and consumer marketing, and he is currently working in the area of social media, with additional interest in gamification. He is current President of AIS SIGGAME, an information systems research group focused on games, game-like applications, and game design. His recent work on game design theory has been mentioned in Gamasutra and Critical Distance. ABSTRACTBusiness organizations are beginning to recognize the substantial potential of social media for enhancing corporate communications with external stakeholders, including investors, customers, and the general public-all of whom can affect firms' financial future. Social media applications reach a wide spectrum of external stakeholders, help them express themselves and connect with one another, and engage them in ongoing conversations with the firm. Despite growing interest in this area, there has been limited research on this important topic. Accordingly, we focus on wikis, social networking sites, micro-blogging sites, and video-sharing sites, among many social media applications, and identify their respective beneficial attributes within the context of external communication. In so doing, we illuminate the prominent technical features of the four social media applications and review the existing literature in order to identify how business organizations take advantage of the unique features to facilitate their communicative activities in practice. We ground our analyses in validated conceptual frameworks in the fields of Information Systems and Communication, such as the notion of technology affordances and Hutton (1999)'s framework for public relations. As a result, we suggest the "Eight Affordances" of the four social Downloaded by [Imperial College London Library] at 10:33 06 April 2015 A c c e p t e d M a n u s c r i p t 3 media applications that help corporate communicators. This study expands the social media and technology affordance literature into the important, yet understudied, external communications field.

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