The hidden problem of Facebook and social media at work: What if employees start searching for other jobs?

Companies are increasingly encouraging employees to use Facebook and other social media to interact with coworkers in order to empower collaboration and knowledge sharing. Yet, there is a hidden problem that has been neglected by managers. The more employees interact with coworkers through social media to facilitate their work in the organization, the more likely they are to learn about and become interested in other companies via social media, form new work connections outside the organization, and engage in job search behaviors. The use of social media to facilitate work and benefit organizations could paradoxically risk fostering withdrawal intentions and turnover, which damage organizations. This article provides evidence of this paradox from an empirical study. After having identified the problem, the article proposes both the solutions to avoid and the solutions to adopt, illustrating best practices from successful companies, comparing their benefits and costs, and indicating the situations in which each solution is best implemented. To conclude, I offer 10 recommendations to turn the problem into an opportunity and use social media as an innovative recruitment tool.     

Social media analytics for enterprises: Typology,methods, and processes

This article provides an overview of social media analytics for managers that seek to utilize the practice for social media intelligence. Currently, managers are challenged to analyze an abundance of social media data but lack a framework within which to do so. Toward this end, this article presents a simple typology of social media analytics for enterprises. It also discusses various analytics methods for social media data. Then, this article discusses management processes of social media analytics for enterprises. An illustration of social media analytics is provided with real-world consumer review data. Finally, four challenges are discussed.     

Helping workers understand and follow social media policies

While social media can have significant benefits for organizations, the social media presences and postings of employees can be problematic for organizations. This is especially true when employees have connections to co-workers and managers. Workers posting content deemed inappropriate or detrimental to the organization has led to a significant number of workers being fired for their social media behavior. To avoid such situations, organizations should create social media policies to guide employee content. Organizational implementation of social media policy is on the rise, but serious questions remain as to how to make it effective. One crucial question is how well employees know and understand their employer's policy. In this article, we discuss how to communicate social media policies to workers and help their understanding. To inform our recommendations, we draw on exploratory data from a sample of young adult workers regarding their knowledge of their own company's social media policies.     

Social spending: Managing the social media mix

There is incessant demand for ‘proof’ of return on investment (ROI) for social media spending, and a significant degree of uncertainty among marketers with respect to allocating effort and budget to social media. In this article, we address these issues by identifying different ways that organizations use social media, highlighting important distinctions in these approaches and describing how to frame the spending decision for social media. Additionally, we identify dimensions that can be used to differentiate important types of social media in a social media mix, and relate this to tactical marketing execution. We also highlight the different nature of social objectives, the ‘backward’ process for meeting them, and the importance of establishing a social media ‘mission control’ as part of that process.     

Unlocking the padlock: Retail and public policy in Belgium (1930–1961)

Abstract

During the inter-war and post-war decades, until the dawn of the 1960s, the Belgian retail sector remained very traditional and overcrowded. In that context literature usually points to the Belgian law of 1936/1937 restricting the expansion of department stores. This article outlines the history of this so-called Padlock Law (Loi de Cadenas/Grendelwet), and evaluates its effectiveness and impact. It tries to answer the question as to why the public debate on retailing in Belgium was caught in a deadlock and, specifically, why prohibitive measures against big distribution remained intact for such a long period. It demonstrates how the political dossier of the Padlock was interlinked with a much broader societal debate, that of the survival of the independent classes moyennes/middenstand. The Padlock became a highly symbolic issue, pitting small, family enterprises against big, capitalistic businesses, with all this linked to powerful social perceptions and powered by the dichotomy of modernity versus tradition. In the highly segmented and pillarised Belgian society, reaching a consensus on the modernisation of retailing was only possible after clearly incorporating small independent enterprises into the post-war neo-corporatist welfare state and into its structures of collective bargaining.     

Social networks and social media: Understanding and managing influence vulnerability in a connected society

Influence vulnerability has recently become a concern across society and in business. Such vulnerabilities increase as social networks are leveraged by different entities, oftentimes through social media, to affect how we think and behave. While many instances of social influence are positive and beneficial, others can be quite negative and lead to harmful outcomes for organizations and individuals such as reputational damage and an inability to control desirable thoughts, narratives, and behaviors. In general, they can decrease people’s freedom of thought and behavior. This article draws on the concepts of social embeddedness and network commitment to outline people’s influence vulnerabilities. It then proposes three guidelines to help reduce influence vulnerabilities based on the concepts of trustworthiness, network commitment, and self-management.     

Social media celebrities and new world order. What drives purchasing behavior among social media followers?

Social media celebrities (SMCs) and social media platforms (SMPs) have become indispensable in today's business and marketing settings. Drawing on the celebrity influence model (CIM), this study examines the impact of SMCs on their followers' purchase intention and the moderating influence of SMP usage on the relationships between (a) SMCs and their followers' purchase intention, (b) para-social relationships (PSR) and purchase intention, and (c) identification and purchase intention. We collected 665 valid responses via an online questionnaire in China and then employed partial least squares structural equation modelling (PLS-SEM) to examine the proposed relationships between the variables. The findings revealed that SMCs do not significantly influence their followers' purchase intention directly; however, they do exert such influence through PSR and identification. The results further indicated that SMP usage moderates the effect of PSR and identification on purchase intention. Our study offers both theoretical and managerial contributions. Theoretically, the incorporation of CIM into this study's model augments the PSR and identification literature in the context of SMCs. Again, the moderating effect of SMP usage that we reveal is novel in the social media literature. In practice, marketers in China should consider the credibility and rapport a particular social media celebrity has with his or her followers before contracting that particular celebrity to endorse their products.     

Social interaction via new social media: (How) can interactions on Twitter affect effectual thinking and behavior?

Social interaction plays a central role in effectuation processes, yet we know little about the implications for effectuation when an entrepreneur interacts via particular channels such as social media. To address this gap, our paper uses an inductive, theory-building methodology to develop propositions regarding how effectuation processes are impacted when entrepreneurs adopt Twitter. Twitter is a microblogging platform that can facilitate a marked increase in interaction. We posit that Twitter-based interaction can trigger effectual cognitions, but that high levels of interaction via this medium can lead to effectual churn. We also posit that there is one factor, perceived time affordability, that predicts the level of social interaction in which an entrepreneur engages via Twitter. Further, we propose two factors that moderate the consequences of social interaction through Twitter. These factors are community orientation and community norm adherence. Implications for our understanding of effectuation, of social interaction, and of the impact of social media on entrepreneurial firms are discussed.     

Pre-seed government venture capital funds

This paper analyses a Pre-seed Fund (PSF) government venture capital (VC) program for the purpose of improving our understanding about effective public policy towards entrepreneurial finance. The PSF program is a public-private partnership started in 2002 for the purpose of fostering more investment in nascent high-tech entrepreneurial firms in Australia. Data from Venture Economics indicate PSFs are the primary provider of seed stage VC in Australia, but PSFs are not more likely to invest in high-tech firms than other types of VC funds. PSFs have smaller portfolios (number of investees) per manager than other types of VC funds, and are more likely to invest in firms resident in the same state, but do not stage and syndicate more frequently than other types of VC funds. Overall, therefore, the structure of the program has given rise to mixed performance in terms of finance and governance provided to nascent high-tech entrepreneurial firms. As well, there is also suggestive evidence that the PSF program diminishes the incentives for Innovation Investment Funds (a previously existing Australian government VC fund program) to invest in seed stage ventures, and hence competing government initiatives appear to be crowding out one another. Further evidence suggests that among the four PSFs in existence, one PSF has outperformed the other PSFs in regards to the investee firm patents and financial statement performance, even though this fund has invested less money and charged lower management fees than its counterparts. Hence, a further implication is that the impact of government-sponsored VC funds depends not only on the design of the program but also on the selection of the VC managers carrying out the investments.

论区域振兴战略中财税政策的法治化

区域振兴战略中财税政策在功能上要定位于宏观调控法,而避免单纯把财税政策理解为是政策优惠;在价值上要立足于差别对待的正义,强调发达地区与落后地区的互利共赢;在目标上要坚持科学发展观,强调财税政策对区域经济的可持续发展的贡献力。     

民间借贷政策规制的社会福利效应：一个分析框架

本文通过构建一个民间借贷规制模型来分析需求弹性和行政执法成本对规制效率的影响。模型表明：在民间借贷缺乏需求弹性时,由于高昂的禁令规制成本,对政府而言更为合适的手段是将民间借贷采取合法化、并加以征税的规制政策。在我国,除了通过“民间借贷服务中心”等机构创新来实现民间金融规范化以外,更主要地是打破金融机构市场准入高度管控的体制,允许民间资本进入金融业,使民间金融机构合法化。     

关于零售业态变革的研究

零售业态的变革有其内在规律性。对其变革规律的解释有五种理论。我国零售业近几年得到了很大的发展,也有自身的发展规律。我国零售业在面临许多新的发展机遇的同时,也面临着许多严峻的挑战,面临着如何选择和调整零售业态。