Social media technology usage and customer relationship performance: A capabilities-based examination of social CRM

This study examines how social media technology usage and customer-centric management systems contribute to a firm-level capability of social customer relationship management (CRM). Drawing from the literature in marketing, information systems, and strategic management, the first contribution of this study is the conceptualization and measurement of social CRM capability. The second key contribution is the examination of how social CRM capability is influenced by both customer-centric management systems and social media technologies. These two resources are found to have an interactive effect on the formation of a firm-level capability that is shown to positively relate to customer relationship performance. The study analyzes data from 308 organizations using a structural equation modeling approach.     

How to date your clients in the 21st century: Challenges in managing customer relationships in today's world

Since its first entry into the literature discussion in the 1980s, customer relationship management (CRM) has found its way into nearly every company. Concepts like personalization, loyalty programs, and customer valuation are used regularly to interact with and prioritize customers. Unsurprisingly, this more widespread use has changed our understanding of CRM substantially and as a consequence, the field has seen a remarkable transformation in the past 3 decades. Yet, the CRM strategies implemented by many firms today are frequently still fundamentally based on an understanding of CRM from the early days. The purpose of this article is to outline the origins of CRM and to present the main wisdoms that firms believed to be true about customers 3 decades ago. I then discuss the key insights that academics and managers have obtained in recent years that increasingly challenge those wisdoms. The article ends with an outlook of CRM in years to come and presents some of the major challenges practitioners and researchers will have to deal with in the near future.     

Social Media as the Missing Link: Connecting Communities of Practice to Business Strategy

Communities of Practice (CoP) have long been considered powerful Knowledge Management (KM) mechanisms. CoP, however, are often viewed independently from organizational goals and structures, as they are primarily seen as a means of individual knowledge sharing and learning. In this article, we argue that CoP supported by social media have great potential to contribute to organizational goals, such as business strategy. We seek to support this statement through an embedded case study that includes 54 CoP within a prominent multinational engineering firm. This investigation explores the extent to which CoP contribute to business strategy. The paper's contribution is in providing five guidelines for practice that outline how CoP can be best designed to contribute to business strategy and how social media can serve as the “missing link” to execute those guidelines.     

Social Media and Purchasing Behavior: A Study of the Mediating Effect of Customer Relationships

Overwhelmed by the use of social media in augmenting human interactions, researchers have developed special interest in understanding the use of social media in developing strong and customized relationships with customers. In line with this, the current study aims to explore the impact of social media on purchasing behavior with mediating effect of customer relationship. The findings indicate that majority of the respondents use social media for purchasing purpose and there is a positive relation between social media and customer relationship, as well as social media and purchasing behavior, with customer relationships fully mediating and enhancing the relationship between social media and purchasing behavior. It has been also found that the majority of the respondents use social media for purchasing purposes. This study offers new insights into the conceptual development and understanding of social media in enhancing customer relationships and affecting purchasing behavior. The study acts as a strong support and aid towards developing and managing global customer relationships through the use of social media.     

Engaging Customers through Social Media to Improve Industrial Product Development: The Role of Customer Co-Creation Value

This study aims to investigate the effect of social media on customer loyalty with the mediation of customer co-creation value and to build a customer engagement model through co-creation value, which is supported by product improvement perceived in increasing customer loyalty. The data collection employed a survey method with structured questionnaires which were distributed to 150 respondents who were the members of social media product communities in Indonesia. The findings showed that interactions through social media are able to increase customer engagement, facilitaitng collaboration in co-creation value, allowing the company to improve and develop products based on customers' needs and desires, which will eventually increase customer loyalty.     

Social Issues and Media Sensationalism: The Effectiveness of Teaching Methods to Affect their Perceived Importance

This study assessed the perceived importance of various social issues and the effect that teaching methods have on business students' perceptions of those issues. Subjects in the test group were shown an educational video that explained how some social issues are reported inaccurately with extensive coverage, or sensationalized in the media, resulting in a moral panic. Other issues are not covered as extensively, but may have a more significant impact on business, society and the subject. The importance of five social issues was rated by students who had completed a course that covered business ethics and social responsibility content and those who had not taken the course yet.Results indicated that business ethics and social responsibility course content had no effect on perceived importance of social issues, but that viewing the video did. Subjects who viewed the educational video on social issues in the news media rated those issues receiving extensive coverage as lower in importance than those subjects who did not view the video. Also, subjects who viewed the educational video rated those issues not receiving extensive coverage as higher in importance than those subjects who did not view the video. Implications for business ethics and social responsibility educators are discussed.     

Loyalty to Social Ventures in Social Media: The Role of Social Cause Involvement,Identification, and Commitment

Recently, more social organizations are engaging in market transactions to achieve financial self-reliance. In today’s highly competitive market, it is imperative for such social ventures to bolster long-term support from their consumers through every possible point of access, such as social media. Given the importance of social media in enhancing customer relationships, this study examines factors that promote consumers’ loyalty toward social ventures, focusing on intentions to participate in cause-related activities and opinion-sharing behavior via social media. Data obtained from 304 US consumers confirmed that consumer involvement, identification, and commitment were key determinants of consumer loyalty in social media. The results also showed that the effect of involvement was mediated by identification and commitment. The findings suggest that social ventures should not only attract interested segments through social media, but also engage and enhance their sense of belonging and commitment.     

Influencer marketing: Social media influencers as human brands attaching to followers and yielding positive marketing results by fulfilling needs

While the literature related to this topic has predominantly focused on investigating the influence mechanism that social media influencers (SMIs) impose over their followers, less is known about their attachment mechanism. Given that social media platforms were originally designed to facilitate personal bonding and not product or brand recommendations, we posited that social media followers' emotional attachment to SMIs is an important precedent that affects the followers' behavioral inclination to accept the SMIs' endorsements. We thus drew new attention to the relationship between SMIs and their followers by focusing on their attachment development mechanism and its casual factors and effects. In doing so, Study 1 inductively analyzed the key causal factors, both with respect to SMI persona- and content-driven attributes, that make followers feel attached to SMIs. By integrating the findings of Study 1 with the human brand theory, Study 2 provided empirical evidence after analyzing 325 U.S. consumers' responses about how SMIs' personas (i.e., inspiration, enjoyability, and similarity) and content curation abilities (i.e., informativeness) affected followers to perceive the SMIs as human brands who fulfill their needs for ideality, relatedness, and competence—all of which resulted in an intense attachment to SMIs. It was this positive emotion shaped with SMIs that transferred to SMIs’ endorsements and positively influenced the followers to acquire the products/brands that the SMIs recommended.     

Social media in marketing research: Theoretical bases,methodological aspects,and thematic focus

The widespread use of social media as a marketing tool during the last decade has been responsible for attracting a significant volume of academic research, which, however, can be described as highly fragmented to yield clear directions and insights. We systematically synthesize and critically evaluate extant knowledge of social media marketing extracted from 418 articles published during the period 2009–2021. In doing so, we use an organizing framework focusing on five key areas of social media marketing research, namely, social media as a promotion and selling outlet, social media as a communication and branding channel, social media as a monitoring and intelligence source, social media as a customer relationship management and value cocreation platform, and social media as a general marketing and strategic tool. Within each of these areas, we provide important theoretical, methodological, and thematic insights, as well as future research directions. We also offer useful managerial implications derived from the articles reviewed.