Using Twitter and other social media for business value: A guideline for large US companies

The authors describe how social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook can be used for doing business or for promoting e-commerce applications. They provide a guideline for implementing strategies in social media for promoting business and using the full value of social media. The strengths and weaknesses of the paper are discussed, along with key issues that need to be addressed.

Paper: Culnan, M.J., McHugh, P.J. and Zubillaga, J.I., 2010. How large US companies can
use Twitter and other social media to gain business value. MIS Quarterly Executive, 9(4).
Summary:
The authors in this particular article described how the social media platforms like Twitter
and Facebook can be used for doing business or for promoting the e-commerce applications
and the portions in which the firms mainly lag in terms of exploiting the full value of social
media. As an example, the authors had shown the way Fortune 500 uses the main four social
media platforms for interacting with the customers (Culnan, McHugh and Zubillaga 2010). A
critical argument is performed by the author’s that the three basic stages for exploiting the
whole business value are building the community, absorption of capacity and mindful
adoption. A general guideline to implement the strategies in the social media for promoting
business and using the full value of social media is addressed by the authors in the later
sections of the paper.
Major Strengths:
1) The ways Virtual Customer Environments create the value is precisely shown in table
1 of the paper (Culnan, McHugh and Zubillaga 2010). Branding, sales, customer
service and product development activities can be employed in a single platform to
drive traffic, increase the revenue, saving cost of business and more are appropriately
shown.
2) The five elements of the first stage of value creation, mindful adoption, are
appropriately addressed and detail explanation is presented about how this value
works. Similarly, how the community building and absorptive capacity in the social
media platform can effectively increase the business value is correctly shown by the
authors.
3) The individual sub steps in each element implementation to create and promote the
business value is shown in detail in the Table 5 of the paper. Also, how the three
elements are implemented by following sub steps in each element by three worldwide
popular companies, Walmart, HP and Coca Cola is shown accurately with detail
information by the authors in table 6, 7 and 8 respectively (Culnan, McHugh and
Zubillaga 2010).
4) Towards the end of the paper a total of four guidelines for implementing the social
media for creating business values are addressed and explained with details.
Major weaknesses:
1) The three elements of social media implementation are presented on the basis of
perception, no statistical evidence is produced against choosing the elements. There,
may exist external elements that can be useful for social media implementation.
2) The responses to the questions asked in the community building and Absorptive
capacity section is not given in the paper and as the content in the social media can be
given by any user hence its not always necessarily true. Hence, performed analysis
based on the data obtained by the author may not exactly produce the true result.

Key issues:
1) “Social media applications pose potential risks, which, if not addressed
systematically, can result in serious legal or reputational problems” (Culnan, McHugh
and Zubillaga 2010). What are the potential risks?
2) As given in the sub step of Mindful Adoption, how to train the employees in terms of
addressing the issues in risk management that includes severity and privacy?
3) “Once the decision to adopt social media has been made and the objectives of any
application identified, organizations need to assign responsibility for governance”
(Culnan, McHugh and Zubillaga 2010). What are the responsibilities?

Reference:
Culnan, M.J., McHugh, P.J. and Zubillaga, J.I., 2010. How large US companies can use
Twitter and other social media to gain business value. MIS Quarterly Executive, 9(4).