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MIS Quarterly Executive Vol. 9 No. 4 / Dec 2010 243
© 2010 University of Minnesota
How Large U.S. Companies Can Use Twitter and Other Social Media to Gain Business Value
How Large U.S. CompanieS Can USe
TwiTTer and oTHer SoCiaL media To gain
BUSineSS VaLUe1,2
Mary J. Culnan
Bentley University
(U.S.)
Patrick J. McHugh
Bentley University
(U.S.)
Jesus I. Zubillaga
Bentley University
(U.S.)
MIS
Q
Uarterly
E
xecutive
Executive Summary 2
Social media platforms such as Twitter and Facebook enable the creation of virtual
customer environments (VCEs) where online communities of interest form around specic
rms, brands, or products. While these platforms can be used as another means to deliver
familiar e-commerce applications, when rms fail to fully engage their customers, they
also fail to fully exploit the capabilities of social media platforms. To gain business value,
organizations need to incorporate community building as part of the implementation of
social media.
This article starts by describing the Fortune 500’s use of four of the most popular social
media platforms—Twitter, Facebook, blogs, and client-hosted forums—to interact with
customers. We then argue that to gain full business value from social media, rms need to
develop implementation strategies based on three elements: mindful adoption, community
building, and absorptive capacity. Next, we use case studies of three Fortune 100
corporations to illustrate how they are managing their respective networks of social media
applications. Finally, we provide guidelines for implementing social media.
THE NEED FOR A NEW APPROACH TO
IMPLEMENTING SOCIAL MEDIA
Web 2.0 social media applications such as Twitter and Facebook create new
opportunities for rms to improve their internal operations and to collaborate in new
ways with their customers, business partners, and suppliers. While the press provides
much anecdotal evidence of social media adoption by a wide variety of rms ranging
from the Fortune 500 to very small businesses, achieving and measuring business
value from social media continues to pose challenges to many organizations. For
example, in 2009, McKinsey published the results of a survey of nearly 1,700
executives worldwide about their companies’ use of a wide range of Web 2.0 social
media platforms. The study included use of video sharing (e.g., YouTube), blogs,
microblogging (e.g., Twitter), and social networking (e.g., Facebook or hosted online
communities) for internal purposes or to connect with customers, external partners,
or suppliers. The results showed that 64% used Web 2.0 platforms internally, 56% to
communicate with customers, and 40% to work with external partners or suppliers.
Despite widespread deployment, about one-third of all respondents reported that their
applications had yet to provide measurable benets either when used internally or
with customers or business partners.3
This article focuses on the challenges rms face as they implement social media
applications to interact with customers, and on the value such applications provide.
1 Gerald Kane, Ann Majchrzak, and Blake Ives are the accepting Senior Editors for this article.
2 An earlier version of this article was presented at the ICIS 2009 SIM Academic Workshop on Enterprise and
Industry Applications of Web 2.0, Phoenix, AZ, December 15, 2009. We acknowledge the helpful comments of
the senior editors and the reviewers on prior versions of this paper.
3 Companies reporting benets were more likely to be very large rms, those in business-to-business
relationships, and hi-tech companies. See Bughin, J. and Miller, A. “How Companies are Beneting from
Web 2.0: McKinsey Global Survey Results,” McKinsey Quarterly, September 2009, available at http://www.
mckinseyquarterly.com/home.aspx.
MISQE is
Sponsored by
244 MIS Quarterly Executive Vol. 9 No. 4 / Dec 2010 © 2010 University of Minnesota
Culnan et al. / How Large U.S. Companies Can Use Twitter and Other Social Media to Gain Business Value
Value comes not from the platform itself but from
how a particular social media platform is used, as any
given platform can be used for a variety of purposes.4
More important, however, social media applications
have the potential to provide additional value beyond
familiar e-commerce activities such as distributing
content or driving sales because they enable the
formation of online customer communities, also
known as virtual customer environments (VCEs).
As Table 1 shows, VCEs can support branding,
sales, customer service and support, and product
development, and can also create value in each of
these areas. While customer communities are not a
new idea, they are the focus of growing corporate
interest due to the current popularity of platforms such
as Twitter and Facebook.5
Firms potentially gain value from VCEs when
customers engage with the company on a regular
basis, co-creating content and sharing power. If these
relationships are successful, customers feel like
company insiders, often serving as a champion for the
company and its products. Such customers are more
likely to be loyal to the company’s existing products,
more willing to try its new offerings, and become
resistant to negative information about the company.6
4 See Majchrzak, A., Cherbakov, L., and Ives, B. “Harnessing the
Power of the Crowds with Corporate Social Networking Tools: How
IBM Does It,” MIS Quarterly Executive (8:2), 2009, pp. 103-108.
5 For an overview of the ways social media platforms support
online communities, see Kane, G. C., Fichman, R. G., Gallaugher, J.,
and Glaser, J. “Community Relations 2.0,” Harvard Business Review
(87:11), 2009, pp. 45-50.
6 There is a large body of marketing research that seeks to understand
the formation of customer relationships. For an extended discussion of
how such relationships develop, see Bhattacharya, C. B., and Sen, S.
“Consumer-Company Identication: A Framework for Understanding
Consumers’ Relationships with Companies,” Journal of Marketing
(67:2), 2003, pp. 76-88. Further, there is preliminary evidence that
rms can gain value from building VCEs. One study of top consumer
brands found that consumers who were Facebook fans spent more,
were more likely to continue using the brand, and were more likely to
recommend a product to their friends than non-fans. See “The Value
of a Facebook Fan: An Empirical Review,” Syncapse, June 2010,
available at http://syncapse.com/media/syncapse-value-of-a-facebook-
fan.pdf.
Simply creating a presence on a popular platform like
Facebook or Twitter does not guarantee that customers
will be attracted to a rm’s page and engage with the
rm and other customers. Relationships serve as the
foundation for VCEs, so organizations need a new
approach to implementing social media if they are
to gain value from these communities. Specically,
because use of social media by customers is voluntary,
and communities result from interactions among
members over time, organizations need to take
explicit steps to build communities and to learn from
the interactions. These actions may not be necessary
for other types of application where use of a system
is either a required part of an employee’s job or the
success of an application does not depend on users
developing social relationships with other users.
The purpose of this article is to identify the factors
that lead to effective implementation of VCEs.
Merely using social media to support e-commerce
without engaging customers does not fully exploit
the capabilities of these platforms. We thus
dene two essential characteristics of an effective
implementation:
• The rm attracts a critical mass of participants
who form a community and who engage with
the rm or other community members on an
ongoing basis
• The rm develops processes to benet from
the content created by its customers.
Our research ndings are based on an analysis of the
Fortune 500’s use of four of the most popular social
media platforms—Twitter, Facebook, blogs, and
client-hosted forums—to interact with their customers
and how their use of these four platforms varies by
industry. Second, we argue that to gain value from
social media used for customer applications, rms
need to develop implementation strategies based on
three elements:
Table 1: How Virtual Customer Environments Create Value7
Activity Supported Source of Value
Branding (advertising, public relations, content
delivery)
Drive trafc, viral marketing, customer loyalty and
retention
Sales (includes “call for action”—e.g., link to
purchase item)
Revenue
Customer service and support Cost savings, revenue, customer satisfaction
Product development Revenue
Note: Multiple activities can be supported on a single social media platform. For example, some rms use a single Twitter feed or Facebook page
for multiple activities.
© 2010 University of Minnesota MIS Quarterly Executive Vol. 9 No. 4 / Dec 2010 245
How Large U.S. Companies Can Use Twitter and Other Social Media to Gain Business Value
• “Mindful” adoption
• Community building
• Absorptive capacity.
We describe case studies to illustrate how three very
large rms are managing their respective networks of
social media applications. Finally, we use our ndings
to provide guidelines for practice.
THE FORTUNE 500’S USE
OF FOUR SOCIAL MEDIA
PLATFORMS
We analyzed the content of websites to survey
the Fortune 500’s public use of four social media
platforms—Twitter, Facebook, blogs, and client-
hosted forums—to engage with their customers. We
selected these four platforms because, unlike YouTube
or other sites that are largely used for sharing content,
these four are highly participative; their purpose is
to promote engagement between the rm and its
customers. Our methodology is described in more
detail in Appendix 1.
Table 2 shows the “adoption density” based on the
number of platforms adopted per rm by industry.
On average, each of the Fortune 500 has adopted
slightly more than one social media platform; 36%
have not adopted any of the four platforms while
7% have adopted all four platforms. With three
exceptions, the average number of platforms adopted
by industry is remarkably similar, ranging from 1.13
in General Services to 1.82 in Transportation. Two
of the exceptions are Distribution and Energy rms,
which adopted on average less than one application.
This may be because social media are not appropriate
applications for these industries, which largely serve
business customers or because they have implemented
applications that did not show up in our content
analysis of public websites; social media applications
for B2B rms are likely to be located behind a
rewall. The third exception is IT, where rms on
average have nearly three social media applications,
more than any other industry. 7
Table 3 shows the adoption frequency for each
platform by industry. Overall, Twitter is the most
frequently used (53%), followed by Facebook
(46%), blogs (20%), and client-hosted forums (11%).
However, there are signicant industry differences
for all four platforms. Twitter is the most frequently
used platform in all industries except Retailing, where
Facebook predominates. In two industries (Financial
Services and Other/Misc.), Twitter and Facebook are
tied. IT rms were early adopters of blogs, and this
industry is also a leader in the use of hosted forums
for customer support, which may help to explain why
the IT industry has the highest adoption density.
7 For an extended discussion of how VCEs create value and for
additional examples, see Li, C. and Bernoff, J. Groundswell: Winning
in a World Transformed by Social Technologies, Harvard Business
Press, 2008.
Table 2: Fortune 500 Adoption Density of Social Media Platforms by Industry
Industry (No. of Firms) Number of Social Media Applications per Firm
0 1 2 3 4 Average
Distribution (23) 11 10 1 0 1 0.70
Energy (78) 43 25 9 1 0 0.59
Financial Services (72) 26 13 22 8 3 1.29
General Services (38) 17 7 6 8 0 1.13
Healthcare (18) 5 8 4 0 1 1.11
IT (40) 2 7 4 10 17 2.82
Manufacturing (146) 61 31 30 18 6 1.16
Retailing (54) 10 8 18 13 5 1.91
Transportation (17) 1 5 8 2 1 1.82
Other/Misc. (14) 5 2 6 1 0 1.21
Total (500) 181 (36%) 116 (23%) 108 (22%) 61 (12%) 34 (7%) 1.3
246 MIS Quarterly Executive Vol. 9 No. 4 / Dec 2010 © 2010 University of Minnesota
Culnan et al. / How Large U.S. Companies Can Use Twitter and Other Social Media to Gain Business Value
THREE ELEMENTS OF
EFFECTIVE SOCIAL MEDIA
IMPLEMENTATION
Merely creating a presence on a social media platform
(e.g., launching a corporate Facebook page) does not
ensure the implementation will create value. We argue
that an effective implementation is based on three
elements:
• First, organizations need to make a “mindful
decision” regarding initial adoption
• Subsequently, because social media are
essentially communication systems,
organizations need to build communities
• Finally, they need to develop absorptive
capacity so they can learn from the content
their customers generate.
Mindful Adoption Decisions
When an IT innovation such as social media gains a
high public prole, organizations can feel that they
must urgently jump on the bandwagon, particularly
given the ease and relatively low initial costs of
rolling out some of these cloud-based applications.
Prior research on IT innovation “fashions” found
that organizations can gain legitimacy with
external constituents merely by adopting the latest
technologies. But such an approach does not
necessarily ensure a quality implementation that
yields the desired benets unless a rm makes mindful
decisions about the way the technology is adopted.8
In a mindful adoption, a rm pays careful attention
to its local context, weighing the expected business
value with the risks before deciding to proceed.
Over time, the innovation is absorbed into the
work life of the rm. While a mindful rm may be
early in terms of evaluating innovations, it may not
necessarily decide to become an early adopter or join
the social bandwagon if an innovation is perceived
to have dubious merit. Put another way, mindfulness
means adopting the “right” innovation at the “right”
time and in the “right” way across all phases of
implementation—initial adoption including selection
and conguration, deployment and exploitation.
We believe that mindfulness applied to social media
adoption encompasses ve elements:
1. Making a good decision about which
platform(s) to adopt and how they should be
used
2. Assigning responsibility for governance
3. Identifying metrics to measure value
8 See Wang, P. “Chasing the Hottest IT: Effects of Information
Technology Fashion on Organizations,” MIS Quarterly (34:1), 2010,
pp. 63-85; Fichman, R. G. “Going Beyond the Dominant Paradigm for
Information Technology Innovation Research: Emerging Concepts and
Methods,” Journal of the Association for Information Systems (5:8),
2004, pp. 314-355; and Swanson, E. B. and Ramiller, N. “Innovating
Mindfully with Information Technology,” MIS Quarterly (28:4), 2004,
pp. 553-583.
Table 3: Social Media Platforms by Industry (Number of Firms)
Industry (No. of Firms) Twitter Facebook Blogs Client-Hosted
Forums
Yes No Yes No Yes No Yes No
Distribution (23) 10 13 4 19 1 22 1 22
Energy (78) 28 50 15 63 3 75 0 78
Financial Services (72) 37 35 37 35 15 57 4 68
General Services (38) 18 20 16 22 9 29 0 38
Healthcare (18) 11 7 7 11 1 17 1 17
IT (40) 34 6 32 8 22 18 25 15
Manufacturing (146) 67 79 60 86 29 117 13 133
Retailing (54) 38 16 40 14 14 40 11 43
Transportation (17) 15 2 12 5 3 14 1 16
Other/Misc. (14) 8 6 8 6 1 13 0 14
Total 266
53%
234
47%
231
46%
269
54%
98
20%
402
80%
56
11%
444
89%
© 2010 University of Minnesota MIS Quarterly Executive Vol. 9 No. 4 / Dec 2010 247
How Large U.S. Companies Can Use Twitter and Other Social Media to Gain Business Value
4. Making sure all applications are readily
accessible
5. Managing risks.
1. Making Decisions About Platforms and Their
Deployment. In making a mindful initial decision
to adopt social media to engage with customers,
an organization needs to align the platform with
its organizational culture, its brand(s), its business
objectives, and its customers. For example, does
it make more sense to let various business units
experiment with social media, or should there be a
more formal approach to developing applications?
Are customers likely to be using Facebook, or would
another platform, such as a blog, be more appropriate?
Is the organization interested in developing a customer
support application? If customers will likely support
each other, a forum is a good choice. Twitter may be
the right platform if the organization wants employees
to rapidly respond to customers but would probably be
a bad option if you can’t respond quickly. And in some
cases, the mindful decision might be to not adopt
social media at all.
2. Assigning Governance Responsibility. Once the
decision to adopt social media has been made and the
objectives of any application identied, organizations
need to assign responsibility for governance. There
are many similarities between these new platforms
and the early days of the web. When companies
experimented with websites, they also faced
challenges in managing their online assets, in aligning
their web strategy with the business, and in measuring
the value of their e-commerce applications.
As a consequence, the governance of social media
should share many similarities with governance of
existing hosted e-commerce applications. While
the IT organization was likely responsible for the
initial programming, implementation, and security of
e-commerce applications, individuals with specialized
skills from other areas of the business would also
have been involved. But once an e-commerce
application has gone live, specialists from corporate
communications, marketing, or customer service are
responsible for creating content based on the rm’s
strategy and values (e.g., press releases or promotions)
and for processing incoming transactions (e.g.,
comments submitted via a web form). As a result,
how a rm manages its e-commerce applications can
provide a starting point for structuring the governance
of its social media applications.
3. Identifying Value Metrics. Firms need to develop
two types of metrics to assess whether the objectives
for their social media applications are being realized
and to measure the value from these investments.
The specic measures should reect the objectives
of the respective application. As we dene effective
implementation in terms of community building, one
set of measures should assess community outcomes.
First, measure the size of the community and whether
it is growing. You also need to assess the proportion
of members who are active and how they are
engaging with the content you post. How much time
are they spending on your social media sites? What
is the quantity and tone of the discussion about your
company and your products? Is your content being
redistributed and showing up in blogs or elsewhere?
Are people re-tweeting your tweets? Some of these
outcomes can be measured using metrics already in
use for the organization’s website, while others may
require customized tools.9
An organization will likely be using social media to
support activities such as those listed in Table 1. The
value provided by these initiatives can be measured
by adapting four types of performance indicators
developed for traditional information systems for use
with social media applications:
• Financial (e.g., cost reduction, cost avoidance,
or revenue)
• Organizational effectiveness (e.g., improved
service time, product or service quality, or
customer satisfaction or retention)
• Personnel (e.g., employee satisfaction)
• System (e.g., measures related to IT
performance or information security).10
For example, measures for social media could include
increased sales resulting from social media, cost
savings from shifting customer service from the phone
to social media, or customer satisfaction based on
interacting with the rm’s social media applications.11
4. Making Social Media Applications Readily
Accessible. While attracting a large number of
participants is not necessarily the most important
9 For a more detailed discussion of social media metrics, see
Sterne, J. Social Media Metrics: How to Measure and Optimize Your
Marketing Investment, John Wiley & Sons, 2010.
10 See Zmud, R. W. Information Systems in Organizations, Scott,
Foresman and Company, 1983.
11 Forrester Research recommends measuring the value of social
media initiatives by using a Balanced Scorecard that includes: nancial
measures (e.g., increased revenue or prots or decreased costs), brand
(consumer attitudes related to the rm’s brands), and risk management
(rm is better positioned to note and respond to reputational issues).
See Ray, A. The ROI of Social Media Marketing: A Balanced
Marketing Scorecard Thoroughly Validates Social Media Value,
Forrester Research, July 16, 2010.
248 MIS Quarterly Executive Vol. 9 No. 4 / Dec 2010 © 2010 University of Minnesota
Culnan et al. / How Large U.S. Companies Can Use Twitter and Other Social Media to Gain Business Value
success measure for a social media initiative, creating
a viable customer community by denition requires a
critical mass of active participants.12 An organization
should therefore take explicit steps to attract users
by ensuring that all social media applications are
prominently promoted and easy to access from its
main webpage and are cross-linked from its other
web applications. Our survey found that while 96% of
client-hosted forums were accessible from the rm’s
homepage, less than 80% of Twitter or Facebook
applications or blogs were accessible in this way.13
Organizations should ensure that they have a central
inventory of all their social media applications
and that the applications are readily accessible to
the public via links or an accessible “community”
webpage. If individual business units or employees are
allowed to create their own social media applications,
there should be a policy that the developer has to
notify the keeper of the inventory to make sure new
applications are included in the links from existing
applications on the rm’s website. The policy should
also require new social media applications (e.g.,
Facebook page) to include links to the rm’s website
and other existing social media applications as
appropriate.
5. Managing Risks. Social media platforms pose new
and serious risk management issues for rms because
a large number of employees may be creating content
or interacting with customers on behalf of the rm.
Risks include security breaches, breaches of client
condentiality, leaks of intellectual property, and
violations of the rm’s policies or codes of conduct.14
Firms in regulated industries (e.g., pharmaceuticals,
health care, or nancial services) may face additional
legal requirements.15 Organizations should address
these risks proactively by developing policies that
address acceptable and unacceptable behaviors for
both customers and employees. They should provide
employees with training in permissible forms of
12 Social media applications typically require more than 1,000 users
to be effective since only a core of members will be active contributors.
See Fenwick, N. The CIO’s Guide to Social Computing Leadership,
Forrester Research, March 31, 2010.
13 A recent study of 30 leading national marketers found that only
56% of the Facebook pages analyzed were prominently promoted on a
rm’s main website. See Parrish, M. How to Create an Effective Brand
Presence on Facebook, Forrester Research, August 12, 2010.
14 For more detailed information on potential risks, see Web 2.0: A
Complex Balancing Act – The First Global Study on Web 2.0 Usage,
Risks and Best Practices, McAfee, Inc., 2010, available at http://
newsroom.mcafee.com/images/10039/Web2report.pdf.
15 For specic examples of some of these regulations, see
McNicholas, E. R. and Ross, S. B. “Regulated Social Media: Practical
Advice for Addressing Evolving Technologies in Regulated Industries,”
Privacy & Security Law Report, 9PVLR24, The Bureau of National
Affairs, June 14, 2010.
communication before rolling out any new social
media applications and should monitor subsequent use
for compliance.
Community Building
Many of the most effective social media initiatives
targeted at customers are communities with a critical
mass of people who identify with the community and
stay involved. The greater involvement an individual
has with the community, the more likely he or she is to
contribute. Further, over time, people develop a sense
of responsibility to the community based on their
exchanges with other members.16
Simply creating a presence on a popular platform
such as Twitter or Facebook won’t guarantee that an
organization will attract customers to its page. The
results of our survey of the Fortune 500’s use of social
media also shows that there is considerable variation
in their ability to successfully establish ongoing
relationships with a critical mass of customers and to
build viable communities. For Twitter, the number of
followers ranged from just one to 1.6 million, with
an average of 36,000. For Facebook, the number of
fans ranged from zero to 5 million, with an average of
86,000. However, 112 (48%) of the 231 Fortune 500
rms with a Facebook page had fewer than 1,000 fans,
and 16% had fewer than 100 fans. Of the 266 Fortune
500 rms with Twitter feeds, 116 (44%) had posted
less than 100 tweets, and 155 (58%) rms had fewer
than 1,000 followers.
There are likely to be multiple explanations for these
ndings, including the time elapsed since the initial
adoption (we were not able to determine how long the
sites had been operational). However, the majority of
both Facebook pages and Twitter feeds, even those
with small numbers of fans or followers, contained
content created during the current month, suggesting
most sites were active. Further, a spot check of some
of the Facebook pages conducted approximately six
months after we collected our data revealed most of
these pages had subsequently attracted more than the
1,000 fans needed for critical mass. Nonetheless, rms
still need to be proactive about building a community
as their portfolio of social media applications evolves.
Because use of social media by customers is
voluntary, and the community arises because of
interactions among members over time, organizations
16 For an extensive discussion of social factors that promote
community, see Nambisan, S. and Baron, R. “Different Roles, Different
Strokes: Organizing Virtual Customer Environments to Promote Two
Types of Customer Communications,” Organization Science (21:2),
2010, pp. 554-572.
© 2010 University of Minnesota MIS Quarterly Executive Vol. 9 No. 4 / Dec 2010 249
How Large U.S. Companies Can Use Twitter and Other Social Media to Gain Business Value
need to take explicit steps to build a community. As
mentioned already, these actions may not be necessary
for other applications where use of a system is either a
required part of an employee’s job or where success of
the application does not depend on users developing
social relationships with other users.
An Infrastructure to Support VCEs. Organizations
need to create and maintain an infrastructure that
enables and supports a community in their VCE.17 The
purpose of this infrastructure is to attract and retain
a critical mass of participants. The rst and most
important element is content. Without a continual
supply of compelling content, there is no reason for
people to visit an organization’s social media site. An
organization typically bears primary responsibility
for initiating content on Twitter and Facebook and
in blogs that will motivate its customers to respond.
For example, providing opportunities for customers
to engage with the rm’s executives or other
“celebrities” can promote engagement.
Recognizing contributions from community members,
particularly in support or product development
forums, is another important way of retaining
members by enhancing their reputation. Further, such
recognition can build trust within the community by
providing other members with a way to assess the
credibility of strangers.
As described previously, to promote an environment
that is conducive to participation and to avoid legal
risks, organizations also need to develop formal
policies for acceptable user-generated content and
behavior for both their customers and their employees.
17 For a more extensive discussion of building an infrastructure to
support community, see Culnan, M. “If You Build It, Will They Come?
Gaining Business Value from Social Networking,” Cutter Benchmark
Review (9:5), 2009, pp. 5-11.
Finally, it is essential to respect the norms and
policies of public social media platforms where an
organization has a presence.
Absorptive Capacity
The third element of effective social media
implementation is for organizations to develop
absorptive capacity for their social media. This means
they need the ability to recognize and acquire new
knowledge and to subsequently be able to exploit
any knowledge provided by their customers. Having
a thriving community with a critical mass of active
participants is necessary but not always sufcient to
gain value from a VCE; organizations must also have
the capacity to process or respond to the messages
their customers create.
In effect, social media platforms are a type of
transaction processing system where customers
create messages in the form of tweets, Facebook
wall postings, comments in a blog, or posts to a
hosted online forum. Each message is equivalent to
a transaction. Prior to social media, organizations
received messages from their customers in the form
of postal mail, faxes, phone calls, or e-mail. The
messages received via traditional media differ from
social media applications because with the former, the
content is private and seen only by the organization,
while with the latter, the communications are posted
in a public forum. There are also major differences
between the format of user-generated messages, which
consist of unstructured text, and the organization-
designed structured transactions processed by many
familiar information systems. Table 4 highlights some
of these differences.
To develop absorptive capacity, organizations rst
need to assign formal responsibility for monitoring
the content that users create in their social media
applications. It is important to note that monitoring
Table 4: Organizational vs. Customer-Designed Transactions
Designed by Organization Designed by Customer
Examples Orders, accounting, payroll Complaints, comments, questions,
suggestions
Transaction Format Fixed eld, often numeric No elds, unstructured text
Procedures for
Transaction Processing
Standard rules, including rules for
handling exceptions
Standard rules may not exist, including
rules for what constitutes an exception
Origin of Transaction Electronic or paper form Postal mail, phone, fax, e-mail, social
media, etc.
Knowledge Creation and
Sharing
Reports generated automatically by
transaction processing system
Transactions processed manually; no
automatic reporting
250 MIS Quarterly Executive Vol. 9 No. 4 / Dec 2010 © 2010 University of Minnesota
Culnan et al. / How Large U.S. Companies Can Use Twitter and Other Social Media to Gain Business Value
knowledge content differs from monitoring for
compliance with company policies discussed above
as an element of a mindful adoption. Depending
on the application, the individuals performing the
monitoring could be in customer service, corporate
communications, or marketing.
Second, organizations need to develop formal
systems and rules to be used by employees to process
incoming social media messages. These rules include
criteria for deciding which transactions merit a
response and how to respond to different types of
transactions or messages. For example, should people
be given individual responses, or referred to the rm’s
existing online customer feedback application? Some
rms respond to direct messages they receive on
Twitter in a conversational tone but refer complaints
to an online customer service function. Which
messages should be ignored or even deleted? The
policy should also provide guidelines about how
quickly to respond to various types of transactions
and dene which types of transactions are urgent and
deserving of special attention.
Finally, organizations need to decide how reports
about social media transactions will be created,
shared, and used by the organization. What kinds
of statistics are needed about emerging or ongoing
issues? Can reporting for social media applications be
incorporated with existing reporting systems? Firms
may wish to track problems or trends even if they
decide not to respond to every individual message.
Summary of the Three Elements of
Effective Social Media Implementation
Table 5 summarizes our discussion of the
three elements—mindful adoption, community
building, and absorptive capacity—of successful
implementation of social media. We developed
the principles in this table from our review of both
the academic literature and the growing body of
recommendations for best practices.
THREE CASE STUDIES OF
SOCIAL MEDIA IMPLEMENTATION
To illustrate different approaches to social media
implementation, we developed case studies that
describe how three of America’s largest companies—
Walmart (a B2C retailer), Hewlett-Packard (HP, a B2C
and B2B IT rm), and Coca-Cola (a consumer goods
manufacturer)—are using social media to interact with
their customers. We chose these three because they are
all Fortune 100 rms, have differing business models,
have strong reputations for leadership in marketing
and/or their use of IT, and have implemented
diverse portfolios of social media applications. The
methodology we used to create the case studies is
described in Appendix 2.
Walmart
Table 6 summarizes Walmart’s social media
applications and our observations of its abilities in the
three elements needed for successful implementation.
Walmart’s social media portfolio consists of Twitter
and Facebook applications plus two blogs, all used
primarily to support branding and sales. In addition
to sites devoted to general merchandise, Walmart
has separate sites for two product categories,
beauty (Walmart Beauty) and music (Walmart
SoundCheck). The overall governance of Walmart’s
social media portfolio appears to be centralized, as
its applications are linked from the homepages of the
retail website (www.walmart.com) and the corporate
website (www.walmartstores.com). Further, there
is a separate Twitter gateway page linked from the
corporate website. As a result, the rm’s social media
applications are readily accessible.
Figure 1 shows Walmart’s social media network
diagram (i.e., how its social media and websites are
interlinked).
Walmart’s Checkout blog appears to have been
supplanted by Twitter as the blog has not been updated
for several months. The other blog is devoted to social
responsibility (Walmart Gives Back). The linkages
diagram also includes Facebook pages and Twitter
feeds for Sam’s Club, which operates independently
of the Walmart sites. However, the Walmart Twitter
gateway page includes links to the Sam’s Club Twitter
feeds.
Walmart engages in community building. Its largest
Facebook site has over 1 million fans, and the other
two Facebook pages, SoundCheck and Beauty, both
have over 1,000 fans. The content on the Facebook
and Twitter sites is current, with both employees
and customers contributing and interacting. Walmart
has developed “External Discussion Guidelines”
for Twitter. However, it has no public policy for
Facebook, despite the fact that it has activated the
discussion feature, which along with its Facebook
wall, provides an opportunity to complain or to post
other negative types of comments.
Walmart appears to have developed absorptive
capacity. It responds to messages posted on both
© 2010 University of Minnesota MIS Quarterly Executive Vol. 9 No. 4 / Dec 2010 251
How Large U.S. Companies Can Use Twitter and Other Social Media to Gain Business Value
Table 5: Elements of Effective Social Media Implementation
Mindful Adoption
• Match your adoption of social media platforms to your organization’s culture, your customers, and your
business objectives
• Make applications easy to nd:
- Maintain an inventory of all social media applications
- Provide links from the rm’s homepage or an accessible “community” or gateway page
- Provide easy cross-navigation between your social media applications
- Make sure the links between your social media sites or links back to other websites work
• Develop quantitative and qualitative metrics for measuring the value of your social media applications:
- Design metrics to measure community outcomes (e.g., size of community, frequency of participation,
sharing of content with other social media sites)
- Design metrics to measure traditional outcomes (e.g., revenues, cost savings, increased customer
satisfaction)
• Address risk management issues, including security and privacy issues:
- Create a formal policy for employee use of social media
- Post a privacy notice and “house rules” for participants
- Train employees
- Monitor social media applications for potential problems
Community Building
• Continually populate the site with engaging content:
- Assign formal responsibility for creating content
- Have executives or other company “celebrities” post and interact with community members
• Provide incentives for participation (e.g., recognition)
• Don’t mention the company in every conversation
• Balance freedom with control and accountability; be selective in deleting content
• Be sensitive to the norms and policies of any public platforms you use
Absorptive Capacity
• Assign responsibility to designated employees or departments for monitoring social media based on the
objective(s) of the social media application
• Build on your organization’s existing processes and expertise in public relations, customer service, product
development, or elsewhere for processing customer communications received via other media
• To structure messages, where feasible, integrate your social media applications with your existing web
services (e.g., link to existing web customer support application)
• Develop new procedures for message processing as needed for:
- Identifying and responding to both routine and urgent messages
- Exception-handling
- Answering messages on a timely basis
- Integrating social media with your existing related applications
• To share knowledge across the rm, develop procedures and metrics for reporting
252 MIS Quarterly Executive Vol. 9 No. 4 / Dec 2010 © 2010 University of Minnesota
Culnan et al. / How Large U.S. Companies Can Use Twitter and Other Social Media to Gain Business Value
Table 6: Walmart’s Social Media
Platforms • Twitter (14 sites plus 2 Sam’s Club)
• Facebook (3 pages plus 2 Sam’s Club)
• Blogs (2)
Primary application(s) • Branding
• Sales
Governance approach (based
on links)
Centralized, with sites organized by product
Accessibility (based on links
from corporate website)
• Two social media hubs (corporate and retail websites)
• Both corporate and retail websites have links to a social media page or
link directly to social media sites
• Sam’s Club website does not link to its social media sites; sites can be
accessed directly by using search
Risk management (based on
publicly available policies)
Twitter “External Discussion Guidelines”
Community Building
Critical mass (more than 1,000
fans on Facebook)
Largest Facebook site has over 1 million fans; two other Walmart sites
have more than 1,000 fans
Content creation Most content is current. Both employees and customers post content.
Absorptive Capacity
Evidence rm is monitoring
sites
Yes, based on responses posted on Facebook and Twitter
Rules for message processing • Facebook: respond individually to some specic questions or offer-
related complaints; refer other problems to web form
• Twitter: respond individually to direct messages; policy states store and
customer service issues will not be addressed via Twitter
Figure 1: Walmart’s Social Media Network Diagram
Arrows show di rection of link
WebsiteWebsite B log
Blog FacebookFacebook Twitt erTwitter
© 2010 University of Minnesota MIS Quarterly Executive Vol. 9 No. 4 / Dec 2010 253
How Large U.S. Companies Can Use Twitter and Other Social Media to Gain Business Value
Facebook and Twitter, suggesting it is monitoring
these sites. There also appear to be rules for
processing messages. For example, most customer
service problems are referred to a web form for
reporting a range of problems, while other messages
receive a direct response. But others, particularly in
the Facebook discussion forum, receive no response.
The Twitter guidelines state that store and customer
service issues will not be addressed via Twitter.
Hewlett-Packard
HP’s social media portfolio consists of Twitter and
Facebook applications, blogs, and hosted forums, all
of which are used to interact with its business and
consumer customers. These applications are primarily
used for service and support, as one would expect for
a technology company, as well as to support branding
and marketing. The sites are organized by type of
customer and/or product (see Table 7).
Figure 2 shows HP’s social media network diagram.
The HP case provides some interesting insights into
how the rm introduces a new social media platform.
In the social media network diagram we created in
early 2010, we observed limited use of Twitter. HP
had created three sites that were linked to each other
but not linked to anything else. When we updated our
diagram a few months later, HP had created additional
Twitter sites, linked each site back to hp.com, and
removed the links connecting the original three
Twitter sites. This suggests it had successfully tested
these prototypes and subsequently completed a formal
rollout.
HP’s governance approach appears to be a mix of
centralization and decentralization. Forums and blogs,
both of which appear to be client-hosted, are linked
from the rm’s main corporate website (www.hp.com)
via a “Connect with Others” community page and a
blog gateway. However, the HP Facebook and Twitter
sites, which are not client-hosted, are not linked from
the website nor do they appear on HP’s “Connect with
Others” community page. Moreover, we were unable
to nd a list of all of HP’s Facebook and Twitter sites,
Table 7: HP’s Social Media
Platforms • Twitter (5 sites)
• Facebook (6 pages)
• Forums (more than 80)
• Blogs (more than 50)
Primary application(s) • Customer service and support
• Branding
Governance approach (based
on links)
Mix of centralized and decentralized, with sites organized by product and/
or type of customer
Accessibility (based on links
from corporate website)
• One social media hub
• hp.com links to community pages for blogs and forums
• No links from hp.com to Facebook or Twitter sites
Risk management (based on
publicly available policies)
• Facebook guidelines posted on wall of primary Facebook site only
• “Rules of Participation” for forums
• Employee “Blogging Code of Conduct”
Community Building
Critical mass (more than 1,000
fans on Facebook)
Largest Facebook site has over 100,000 fans. All Facebook sites have more
than 1,000 fans. Extensive recognition system for forums.
Content creation Most content is current. Both employees and customers post content.
Absorptive Capacity
Evidence rm is monitoring
sites
Yes. Forums moderated. Response to direct messages on Twitter.
Rules for message processing • Steer support problems to forums
• Twitter: respond individually to direct messages
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Culnan et al. / How Large U.S. Companies Can Use Twitter and Other Social Media to Gain Business Value
suggesting that it has not connected newer non-client-
hosted applications to its inventory of existing hosted
applications on its website.
HP engages in community building. Its largest
Facebook page (HP for Home) has more than
100,000 fans, and all of its Facebook sites have more
than 1,000 fans. Both employees and customers
create content, and most content is current. The
company also uses recognition to build community
in its forums. It has developed formal “Rules of
Participation” for its forums and an “Employee
Blogging Code of Conduct.” HP has posted guidelines
on the wall of its HP for Home Facebook site, but the
other Facebook sites do not have a posted policy.
The company appears to have developed absorptive
capacity. Its forums are moderated and it responds to
direct messages on Twitter. Further, support problems
are directed to the forums.
Coca-Cola Company
Coca-Cola’s social media portfolio consists of eight
Facebook pages, seven Twitter sites, and a blog run by
Coca-Cola’s historian/archivist. The sites are divided
between those related to a specic brand of the Coke
soft drink and those for the Coca-Cola Company as a
corporate entity (see Table 8).
In our research, we focused on social media
applications for the Coke brands (Diet Coke, Coke
Classic, and Coke Zero brands as well as Coca-Cola
Company sites that apply across brands (e.g., World
of Coca-Cola and the Coca-Cola Store). These sites
are used primarily to support branding and, to a lesser
extent, sales. Coca-Cola also owns many other brands
(such as Simply Orange), which have their own
websites and social media applications.
Coca-Cola’s governance approach appears to be
decentralized. The main consumer website (www.
coca-cola.com) links to the fan-run Coca-Cola
website. The main corporate website (www.thecoca-
colacompany.com) links to the Coke Twitter feeds, the
fan-run Facebook page, and the Coca-Cola Company
Heritage Blog. This blog links to Facebook and
Twitter applications for the Coca-Cola archives. The
consumer and corporate websites link to websites for
other brands (e.g., Nestea, Sprite) or company-wide
websites (World of Coca-Cola or Coca-Cola Store).
While these two websites link to their own social
media applications, the majority of brand websites
do not link to any social media applications. The
Facebook page for the Coca-Cola Freestyle beverage
dispensing machine is not linked to anything. The
only way to locate these applications is to do a Google
search.
Figure 3 shows Coca-Cola’s social media network
diagram.
Figure 2: HP’s Social Media Network Diagram
Arrows show di rection of link
WebsiteWebsite BlogBlog ForumForumFacebookFacebook TwitterTwitter
© 2010 University of Minnesota MIS Quarterly Executive Vol. 9 No. 4 / Dec 2010 255
How Large U.S. Companies Can Use Twitter and Other Social Media to Gain Business Value
Coca-Cola engages in community building. The main
“ofcial” Facebook page currently has more than 10
million fans and attracts tens of thousands of new fans
per day;18 these individuals contribute content on an
ongoing basis. Although a Google search lists the site
as “ofcial,” it appears to have evolved independent
of any efforts on Coca-Cola’s part. It was originally
created by two independent fans and subsequently
adopted by Coca-Cola. Coca-Cola employees do
not appear to create content, respond to comments
or answer questions posted by customers. The other
Facebook pages we analyzed have over 1,000 fans
each with the exception of the Coke Classic page,
18 See http://pagedata.insidefacebook.com.
which appears to be inactive. The content on the
Facebook and Twitter sites is current. Both customers
and employees post content on all sites with the
exception of the fan-run Facebook page.
In 2009, Coca-Cola issued “Online Social Media
Principles,” which apply company-wide to all its
brands. These principles dene expectations for
speaking “for” the company and for speaking “about”
the company as well as expectations for online Coca-
Cola spokespeople. Further, the fan-run Facebook
page has “House Rules” and also links to a more
legalistic “Terms of Use” for the fan page. The House
Rules state that Coca-Cola employees monitor the
site and remove obscenities and other inappropriate
Table 8: Coca-Cola’s Social Media
Platforms • Twitter (7 sites)
• Facebook (8 pages)
• Blog (1)
Primary application(s) • Branding
Governance approach (based
on links)
• Decentralized
• Sites organized by product or corporate function
Accessibility (based on links
from corporate website)
• Corporate website is primary social media hub with links to blog,
Twitter, and fan-run Facebook site
• Coca-Cola consumer website links only to fan-run Facebook page
• Blog links to its own Facebook page and Twitter site
• World of Coca-Cola website links to its own Facebook page and Twitter
site
• Freestyle Facebook page is not linked from any websites
• Majority of other brands do not link to their social media applications
Risk management (based on
publicly available policies)
• Facebook fan-run page has “House Rules” and “Terms of Use”
• Blog has its own “House Rules”
• “Coca Cola Company Online Social Media Principles” for employees;
company runs a Social Media Certication Employee Program for
ofcial company representatives
Community Building
Critical mass (More than 1,000
fans on Facebook)
Yes. Largest Facebook site has more than 10 million fans. Other sites have
more than 1,000 fans except for one inactive brand site.
Content creation Most content is current. Both employees and customers post content.
Employee participation varies greatly by site.
Absorptive Capacity
Evidence rm is monitoring
sites
Yes, based on responses posted on Twitter and some Facebook sites. Main
Facebook page states content will be monitored. Social media policy is to
“listen” to the online community.
Rules for message processing • Twitter: respond individually to direct messages
• Social media policy requires keeping records of online interactions
256 MIS Quarterly Executive Vol. 9 No. 4 / Dec 2010 © 2010 University of Minnesota
Culnan et al. / How Large U.S. Companies Can Use Twitter and Other Social Media to Gain Business Value
material. There is also a disclaimer that comments
posted on the page do not represent the opinions of
the company. The blog also has its own House Rules,
which state that all comments will be monitored
before they go live.
Coca-Cola appears to have developed absorptive
capacity. As described above, it states that it monitors
the Facebook site and the blog. It also responds to
messages posted on its other Facebook sites and
to Twitter messages, which suggests additional
monitoring. Further, the Social Media Principles
indicate that employees should “listen” to the online
community. These principles also provide some
limited insights into the rules used for message
processing. For example, online spokespeople
are required to keep records of their social media
interactions and employees are requested to forward
important comments to a specic internal e-mail
address.
GUIDELINES FOR IMPLEMENTING
SOCIAL MEDIA
Interest in implementing social media platforms to
create VCEs continues to grow. A 2009 survey on IT
innovation found that 20% of leading rms planned
to innovate with IT to engage customers in new ways,
with 23% saying they planned to use IT to improve
customer service. Nearly half said they were adopting
wikis,19 blogs, or social networking tools for external
collaboration.
We offer the following four preliminary guidelines
for effective implementation of social media. Our
guidelines are based on the inferences we drew from
our observations and on the literature cited in the
footnotes. We focus on issues that we believe are
likely to have the greatest relevance to IT executives
and that are concerned with coordinating the IT unit’s
activities with other business units. While our survey
data and cases provide a snapshot of the current
state of social media implementation, we believe our
ndings suggest there are multiple paths to effective
implementation of social media as long as the initial
adoption decision is mindful.
1. Coordination is Needed to Promote
Use
In the early days of the web, companies were often
plagued with broken links as their websites evolved.
We observed a similar problem in both our survey
and our cases: a failure of companies to provide
access to their social media applications from their
corporate websites. Making social media applications
19 A wiki is a website that allows the easy creation and editing of any
number of interlinked web pages via a web browser using a simplied
markup language or a WYSIWYG text editor.
Figure 3: Coca-Cola’s Social Media Network Diagram
Arrows show di rection of link
WebsiteWebsite BlogBlog Fac ebookFacebook TwitterTwitter
© 2010 University of Minnesota MIS Quarterly Executive Vol. 9 No. 4 / Dec 2010 257
How Large U.S. Companies Can Use Twitter and Other Social Media to Gain Business Value
readily accessible can both help build communities
and promote the availability of these sites to support
e-commerce applications such as customer service or
sales.
The absence of links from the main company website
to the social media applications running on public
platforms (e.g., Twitter and Facebook) suggests a lack
of coordination between IT and the business units
that appear to have developed and now manage these
applications. For example, HP has clear links from
its corporate website to its social media applications
hosted in-house; however, there are no such links
for its social media applications hosted on public
platforms. As we suggested previously, organizations
need to develop coordination procedures to ensure
that there is a central inventory of social media
applications and that there is a process for ensuring
that links are created for new applications at the
appropriate time.
2. Address Risk Management Issues Up
Front
Social media applications pose potential risks, which,
if not addressed systematically, can result in serious
legal or reputational problems. As we discussed
earlier, an important component of a mindful adoption
decision is the development of comprehensive policies
for both employees and customers setting out what
constitutes acceptable content and appropriate ways of
communicating. A rm’s acceptable-use policies can
serve as a starting point for employee policies, as can
some of the publicly available policies we identied
during our case study research. Customers should
also be reminded of the rm’s policies that govern the
privacy of the information they post.
Additionally, even if an organization decides that the
benets of implementing social media are lower than
the costs, it is certain that its customers, employees,
and other external stakeholders are using social media.
A failure to develop policies governing employee use
and to monitor what is said about the rm in external
communities is therefore a recipe for trouble.
3. Develop Procedures to Process
Unstructured Transactions
As mentioned above, social media are really a new
type of communication system, with customers
creating and transmitting unstructured messages
(transactions); organizations need rules for processing
these transactions. For some companies, this may
involve linking from the social media application
to the rm’s existing customer service application
as Walmart does. Others may need to develop new
applications to capture and report on incoming
transactions that cannot be processed by existing
applications. Examples include the use of Twitter
to respond quickly to customer service problems
or to support social media applications where
customers are encouraged to submit and vote on new
product ideas, such as Starbuck’s My Starbucks Idea
(www.mystarbucksidea.com) or Dell’s IdeaStorm
(www.ideastorm.com). Where large numbers of
employees are empowered to use social media, new
communications procedures may be needed to collect
relevant information about their interactions, as Coca-
Cola’s request for employees to forward comments to
an internal e-mail address illustrates.
4. Lessons for Implementing Internal
Social Media Applications
Although we have focused on the use of social media
to interact with customers, many of our ndings and
guidelines can also be applied to the implementation
of social media within a rm to support knowledge-
sharing among employees. As with VCEs, community
building is central to the success of internal social
media applications. However, because the potential
change in work practices and relationships brought
about by such applications is enormous (similar to
the changes caused by the adoption of an enterprise
system), there could be strong resistance if the
implementation is not managed carefully.
CONCLUDING COMMENTS
More and more rms are using, or plan to use, social
media platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, blogs,
and client-hosted forums to communicate with their
customers. But simply creating an online presence is
not sufcient to ensure that a rm will gain business
value from social media. Successful implementation
strategies require three elements: mindful adoption,
community building, and absorptive capacity. We
developed guidelines from our analysis of the Fortune
500’s use of social media and case studies of how
three large U.S. corporations are successfully using
popular social media platforms. By following the
guidelines provided in this article, rms of all sizes
will be better placed to gain business value from
interacting with their customers and other stakeholders
through social media.
258 MIS Quarterly Executive Vol. 9 No. 4 / Dec 2010 © 2010 University of Minnesota
Culnan et al. / How Large U.S. Companies Can Use Twitter and Other Social Media to Gain Business Value
APPENDIX 1: STUDY
METHODOLOGY AND STATISTICS
BY SOCIAL MEDIA PLATFORM
Data Collected for Each Firm
Between September and November 2009, we
collected data from all Fortune 500 companies on their
use of Twitter, Facebook, blogs, and client-hosted
forums. To achieve this, we:
• Googled the social application + company
name (e.g., “Facebook Walmart”). This
meant we were only able to include public
applications in our study; any applications
running on an extranet or behind a rewall
were excluded.
• Identied the corporate website for each
organization.
• Visited the homepage for each company to
evaluate the social media applications:
- Are the applications readily accessible
from the rm’s homepage (links or via
search)?
- Are the applications current (based on
content posted during the month when
data were collected)?
Twitter
• Number of Twitter feeds (average = two feeds
per rm; range = 1 to 35)
• For rst feed found:
- Number of followers (average = 36,000;
range = 1 to 1.6 million)
- Total tweets (average = 668; range = zero
to 35,000)
- Date of most recent tweet (86% were
during the month when data was collected)
• 78% of Twitter feeds were accessible from the
rm’s homepage.
Facebook
• Number of fans (average = 86,000; range =
zero to 5 million)
• Date of most recent wall post (80% had a wall
post during month when data was collected)
• 76% of Facebook pages were accessible from
the rm’s homepage.
Blogs
• Number of blogs (average = three blogs per
rm)
• Counted blogs implemented on a public
platform or client-hosted
• Date of most recent post in rst blog located
(89% were current)
• 78% of blogs were accessible from the rm’s
homepage.
Client-hosted Forums
• Whether the rm hosts any discussion forums
on its own website (11% host forums)
• 96% of forums were accessible from the rm’s
homepage
• We did not measure the currency of content.
APPENDIX 2: METHODOLOGY
FOR DEVELOPING CASE
STUDIES
We collected data for the case studies by analyzing
the content of each of the three rm’s website(s)
and social media applications. We focused on the
linkages among the rm’s websites and social media
applications (Twitter, Facebook, blogs, and client-
hosted forums) and on their community building and
absorptive capacity activities.
Linkages Between Social Media and
Websites
For each of the three rms, we started by visiting
the corporate websites we used in our survey and
then followed any available hyperlinks between
the social media applications. We used Google
searches to identify additional websites and develop
a more complete inventory of the rm’s social
media applications (Twitter, Facebook, blogs, client-
hosted forums). Next, we recorded links between
the websites and the various social media sites and
the direction(s) of the links. To qualify as a link, a
site needed to provide a hyperlink connection to a
new site, such as a link from the corporate website
to a social media site or a link from a social media
site back to the website. Links could be one-way or
two-way. In Facebook, for example, links typically
were found either under the “Info” tab or under the
“Favorites” listing.
To develop the social media network diagrams,
we used social network analysis and visualization
© 2010 University of Minnesota MIS Quarterly Executive Vol. 9 No. 4 / Dec 2010 259
How Large U.S. Companies Can Use Twitter and Other Social Media to Gain Business Value
software from Analytic Technologies.20 We input
the websites and social media applications as if
they were nodes in a social network together with
the links between them. The result was a pictorial
representation of the rm’s social media network and
how these applications are linked to the organization’s
website(s) and to each other.
Some of the sites we observed were excluded from the
analysis because:
• The visualization software could not process
more than a specic number of nodes and
linkages
• The applications were not customer focused
• We were uncertain that the rm sponsored the
application.
However, most of the primary linked sites were
included in the diagrams. Thus, while these diagrams
are representative of the rm’s applications, they
are not necessarily exhaustive. The diagrams were
originally prepared in January 2010 and updated in
May 2010.
Based on the dispersion in the diagrams, we drew
conclusions about whether the rm had adopted a
centralized or decentralized approach to managing its
social media applications.
Community Building and Absorptive
Capacity
We visited the homepages of each rm’s social media
applications and analyzed the most recent content
to provide a preliminary assessment of community
building and absorptive capacity, based on the
following questions:
Community Building
• Has the rm built a community with a critical
mass of users (>1,000 Facebook fans)?
• Is the content current?
• Who creates content?
• Does the rm have publicly available
social media policies for its employees and
customers?
Absorptive Capacity
• Is the rm monitoring its site(s) based on
responses to posts or direct messages?
20 Borgatti, S. Netdraw Network Visualization, Analytic
Technologies, 2002.
• Can rules for message processing be identied
or inferred from the rm’s responses?
While we believe our ndings are representative, they
do not necessarily represent a complete analysis of all
of a rm’s social media applications.
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
Mary J. Culnan
Mary Culnan (mculnan@bentley.edu) is the
Slade Professor of Management and Information
Technology at Bentley University. Her current
research interests include online communities,
enterprise use of social media, and information
privacy. Her publications include MIS Quarterly,
MIS Quarterly Executive, Communications of the
ACM, Organization Science, Management Science,
New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and Washington
Post. She currently serves on the U.S. General
Accountability Ofce’s Executive Committee on
Management and Information Technology and the
Advisory Board of the Future of Privacy Forum.
She holds a Ph.D. in information systems from the
Anderson School at UCLA.
Patrick J. McHugh
Patrick McHugh (mchugh_patr@bentley.edu) has
over 25 years of industry experience, most recently
as Managing Director at BitInsight, a rm facilitating
innovation via social networks. Previously, he served
in executive roles at three venture-backed companies
selling data security solutions. Earlier initiatives
included building a call center automation practice
at GTE and an online nancial services offering at
IBM. He holds an M.B.A. from Harvard University,
B.S. and M.S. degrees in engineering from Columbia
University, and is completing work for his Ph.D. in
business at Bentley University. His research interests
focus on enterprise innovation and social media.
Jesus I. Zubillaga
Jesus Zubillaga (jesus.zubillaga@autodesk.com) is
currently a Spherion contract employee working as
the Community Relations Manager with Autodesk,
Inc., where he specializes in social media within the
Industry Marketing Division of AEC (Architecture,
Engineering & Construction). His work on this
article was carried out while he was a student in
the McCallum Graduate School of Business at
Bentley University. He holds a B.A. in Multinational
Business Operations and Marketing from Florida
State University and an M.B.A. in Management from
Bentley University. He also has prior experience in the
nancial services industry.
