Corporate Use of Social Media: Technology Affordance and External Stakeholder Relations

Abstract

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.

Social Media Affordances and Information Sharing: An Evidence from Chinese Public Organizations

“…Social media affordance deals with those hidden possibilities that establish a link between the user and social media (Cabiddu, 2014). Prior research shows that scholars used affordance theory to define the role of social media in organizational practices, which includes knowledge sharing (Gibbs, Rozaidi, & Eisenberg, 2013;Majchrzak, 2013), knowledge creation (Mansour, 2013;Wagner, 2014), external communication (Argyris, 2015), intellectual capital production (Kane, 2011), election campaigns (Dyrby, 2012), activism (Obar, 2014), customer engagement (Cabiddu et al, 2014), and government openness (Malsbender, 2013;Stamati, 2015).…”

Contextualizing a professional social network for health care: Experiences from an action design research study

“…According to Treem and Leonardi (), this increased visibility has the potential to present information communally, which means contributions can be easily located and viewed by other coworkers, as well as even generate metaknowledge that is not available in any traditional knowledge repositories or elsewhere. In addition, posts, comments, status updates, votes, revisions, and other forms of information sharing frequently afford improved transparency of ongoing or planned organizational activities (Zhao & Rosson, ) and are therefore invaluable for the corporate setting (Argyris & Monu, ). Particularly in the health care industry, where collaboration and knowledge exchange are crucial for delivering high‐quality services (Cnossen, ; Merrick, Joanne, & Scott, ), PSN may unfold new opportunities in the discovery of expertise, facilitation of cross‐boundary collaboration, preservation of the institutional memory, and harness of distributed knowledge of health workers and patients (Miller, Marks, & DeCoulode, ).…”

Social Media Strategies in the Retail Sector

“…Freeman's Stakeholder Theory [27] describes such stakeholders as anyone "who can affect or is affected by the achievement of the organisation's objectives" which includes customers, shareholders and suppliers. Argyris and Monu [28] argue that the primary function of EC is to build relationships with customers and to increase loyalty. Research [29] suggests that the utilisation of SM in support of EC speeds up communication and also improves its effectiveness and reach.…”

“…In a survey based on 2,100 companies, Harvard Business Review [30] found that the most common SM tools used for EC included social networking sites, micro-blogging, wikis and video sharing. Argyris and Monu's [28] 'Eight Affordances' represent the competencies of SM tools which include: Presentability; Self-Expression; Monitorability; Reach; Engagement; Connectivity; Recordability; and Availability. These cover activities of SM with EC such as engaging with stakeholders, collecting data from stakeholders and facilitated monitoring of EC efforts.…”