Utilization of social media in an organizational context: A qualitative study

Abstract: Since the Internet penetration rate is nearly at one third of the world’s population and social networks experience an ongoing exponential growth, becoming a part of our everyday life, companies feel forced to join this trend. Concerning this development, a lot of scientific articles and studies were published about how organizations can also benefit from this growth. The main focus of this research was mainly based on the marketing aspect and social networks, neglecting the other possible application fields and especially disregarding the remaining types of social media. Therefore, the purpose of this study has been to investigate how social media can have an influence on companies' activities in regard to their value chain, according to the theory by Michael E. Porter.

In terms of the methodology, the thesis pursued a qualitative approach, as four semi-structured personal interviews were conducted to collect data, which was subsequently presented and analyzed individually. Afterwards, a cross-case analysis, comparing all four cases, was carried out in order to detect similarities and differences, as well as to be able to draw conclusions from the collected data in regard to the research problem.

The results indicate that the main focus of social media usage is still in the fields of marketing and sales, but became similar important for service, respectively CRM purposes. In addition, it was discovered that it is utilized to a greater extent in the support activity firm infrastructure and started to influence human resource management, as well. All companies mainly applied the market leading platforms for the respective type of social media. The study further revealed that the sampled companies are especially concerned about challenges like the required extensive commitment of all employees, the accompanied time-intensive learning process, as well as the fast paced and complex environment of social media. Regarding the mentioned challenges, it became apparent that very important tasks are to continuously observe the current developments and encourage the employees in order to exploit the potentials of social media successfully.