| Abstract: |
Social media is termed as the internet based network platforms which enable content creation by the users like reviews, discussions, and feedback. Nowadays organizations use social media platforms to create awareness about their products among potential customers. Use of social media is a cost effective medium to access groups of people and obtaining information from them to improve upon and devise the methods for taking better decisions. Twitter, Facebook, Wikipedia, Blogs are few of the examples of social media platforms where users can connect. Currently, there are around 3.6 billion social media users world-wide and the count is continuously increasing (“Source URL: https://www.statista.com/statistics/278414/number-of-worldwide-social-network-users/, accessed on 30-Dec-2020”). Even the famous online vendors like Amazon, Netflix, and so on use social media platforms for gaining popularity towards their products. Obtaining feedback on the products from customers through traditional ways like meetings and surveys are not effective. With the ever increasing usage of social media, it is crucial to study the effect of social media usage in value creation of an organization.
In the current study we try to explore the potential research gaps inferred in earlier investigations of relation between social media and value of an organization. We investigate the mentioned relation with the lens of value co-creation theory. Literature defined the concept of co-creating value as the value created by involving customers to present the suggestions about the product development and services to the organization. Further applying the concept of value co-creation, earlier works identified that value creation space of an organization consists of customer space, supplier space and joint space and value co-creation takes place in joint space. In view of rising popularity of social networking sites nowadays, we argue that social media is an effective way to enable the joint co-creation space between customer and organization.
Further, literature suggests that there has been a focus on investigating qualitative aspects of value co-creation (referred to as traditional measures of value co-creation) via social media like impact of social media on moral enhancement, customer empowerment, intention to purchase. Hence, there is a need to investigate the quantitative measures of value co-creation like impact of social media on financial performance based firm value measures of an organization like return on assets (ROA), Tobin’s q etc.
Also, ample number of studies investigated the antecedents of value co-creation on social media like information processing capabilities of the engagement platforms, perceived expectations of the users, customers’ value perception, hedonic and social benefits to the users, etc. The mentioned studies have implications in identifying the drivers to motivate the users to share content on social media, intention to participate, customer engagement, and so on. However, it is indispensable to investigate the demotivating factors which resist the users to participate and engage in social media.
Based on the above discussions, we propose to investigate the below mentioned phenomena:
• Impact of social media on quantitative measures of value of an organization (e.g.: ROA, Tobin’s q etc.).
• Social media disengagement factors which demotivate the users from participation through social media and hence affect value co-creation. |