Social Media Use and Potential in Business-to-Business Companies’ Innovation

Abstract

The use, potential and challenges of social media in innovation have received little attention in the literature, especially from the standpoint of the business-to-business sector. Therefore, this paper focuses on bridging this gap. The purpose of this paper is to study the use and potential of social media in the innovation context, especially from the perspective of business-to-business companies. The paper starts by defining of social media and Web 2.0, and then characterizes social media in business, social media in the business-to-business sector and social media in the business-to-business innovation process. The paper also studies the essential differences between business-to-consumer and business-to-business in the given respects. Finally the authors present and analyze the results of their empirical survey of 110 respondents from Finnish companies. The results suggest that there is a significant gap between the perceived extensive potential of social media and current social media use in innovation in business-to-business companies. They have also identified potentially effective ways to reduce the gap, and clarify the found differences between B2B’s and B2C’s.

A process-based framework of using social media to support innovation process

“…Jussila et al [53,54] explored social media and their benefits from business-to-business (B2B) innovation perspectives and found that innovation-related benefits of social media use include increased customer focus and understanding, increased level of customer service, and decreased time-tomarket. Kärkkäinen et al [56] found that social media was less actively used in closed innovation (2.2 %) by B2B companies than in the collaboration with other outside organizations (4.5 %), as well as customers and partners.…”

“…Incorporating social media into organizational innovation practice could be a double-edge sword to many organizations today. A recent survey study lists the following three risk factors: (1) lack of understanding for the possibilities of social media in innovation, (2) difficulties in assessing its financial gains, and (3) lack of suitable case evidence that prevent many companies from adopting social media in their innovation practice [56]. Particularly, there are not enough case materials currently to analyze and discuss the adoption and use of social media for organizational innovation [7].…”

Impact of Social Media Applications on Small Business Entrepreneurs

“…Small businesses use social media application as a marketing tool for the branding and marketing of their products. A practical approach has been followed by Karkkainen, Jussila, Vaisanen (2010) who investigated general companies to actually see how much of the social media application has actually penetrated the nontechnology and traditional organizations. Based on survey results, they have found the adoption of social media by businesses is inclined more toward communication to the customer in the traditional sense, such as branding, public relations, and lead generation, rather than communication with the customer, understanding the customer, and internal communications.…”

Features of food industry on the Internet: A case of Lithuania

“…A lot of researchers paid attention to the quality assessment of website (Aladwani, 2006;Collier & Bienstock, 2015;Cuddihy & Spyridakis, 2012;Dholakia & Zhao, 2009;Guseva, 2010;Hasan & Abuelrub, 2011;Lee & Kozar, 2012;Rocha, 2012;Saremi, Abedin, & Kermani, 2008;Shejul & Padmavathi, 2015;Subramanian, Gunasekaran, & Yu, 2014;Wang, Yeh, & Yen, 2015;Zhang & Dran, 2000), customer behavior (Alzola & Robaina, 2010;Bressolles & Durrieu, 2010;Dennis, Merrilees, Jayawardhena, & Wright, 2009;Hamid & McGrath, 2015;Hodkinson, Kiel, & McColl-Kennedy, 2000;Yue & Chaturvedi, 2000;Maditinos & Theodoridis, 2010;Rahim, 2014;Su, Li, Song, & Chen, 2008), marketing communication tools such as: research in the area of web advertising efficiency (Moore, Stammerjohan, & Coulter, 2005;Richardson, Ganz, & Vallone, 2014), social media usage in different communication models (Agnihotri, Dingus, Hu, & Krush, 2015;Chan & Guillet, 2011;E Constantinides, 2015;de Vries, Gensler, & Leeflang, 2012;Jarvinen, Tollinen, Karjaluoti, & Jayawardhena, 2012;Kärkkäinen, Jussila, & Väisänen, 2010;Laroche, Habibi, & Richard, 2013;Michaelidou, 2011;Pabedinskaitė & Davidavičius, 2012;Riemer & Richter, 2010). It is important that social media us...…”