How to Use Social Media to Create Business Value: A Report

This report analyzes the business value derived from social media platforms, focusing on how companies can leverage platforms like Twitter and Facebook to enhance their e-commerce applications and customer engagement. The report examines the ways in which Fortune 500 companies utilize social media and highlights three key stages for maximizing business value: community building, absorptive capacity, and mindful adoption. The report also presents a detailed analysis of the strengths, such as the clear presentation of value creation through virtual customer environments and the detailed explanation of mindful adoption. It also identifies weaknesses, including the lack of statistical evidence and the potential unreliability of user-generated content. The report concludes with a discussion on how businesses can implement social media strategies to increase revenue and reduce business costs.

Introduction:
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).
Summary:
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.
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.

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).