Advances in Social Media Research:Past, Present and Future

Social media comprises communication websites that facilitate relationship forming between users from diverse backgrounds, resulting in a rich social structure. User generated content encourages inquiry and decision-making. Given the relevance of social media to various stakeholders, it has received significant attention from researchers of various fields, including information systems. There exists no comprehensive review that integrates and synthesises the findings of literature on social media. This study discusses the findings of 132 papers (in selected IS journals) on social media and social networking published between 1997 and 2017. Most papers reviewed here examine the behavioural side of social media, investigate the aspect of reviews and recommendations, and study its integration for organizational purposes. Furthermore, many studies have investigated the viability of online communities/social media as a marketing medium, while others have explored various aspects of social media, including the risks associated with its use, the value that it creates, and the negative stigma attached to it within workplaces. The use of social media for information sharing during critical events as well as for seeking and/or rendering help has also been investigated in prior research. Other contexts include political and public administration, and the comparison between traditional and social media. Overall, our study identifies multiple emergent themes in the existing corpus, thereby furthering our understanding of advances in social media research. The integrated view of the extant literature that our study presents can help avoid duplication by future researchers, whilst offering fruitful lines of enquiry to help shape research for this emerging field

International Conference on Information Systems (ICIS) 2015

Well-designed peer review and assessment tasks have been shown in several studies to increase students' engagement in courses and to help their ability to critique and evaluate work. These positive effects are primarily achieved through a "change of hats”, from writer to reviewer. Peer assessment by three to five students has been shown to be as valid as marking by teaching staff (e.g., lecturers or tutors). In this paper, I share an information technology (IT)-enabled peer review model with scaffolded assignments. The model is based on the idea of scaffolding peer-assessed assignments. That is, reading other students’ assignments becomes relevant for the reviewing student’s next assignment to make undertaking the review more interesting and relevant. In addition, the model considers several peer review quality assurance measures, including detailed marking rubrics, marks for review quality and meta-review by teaching staff. The model shifts the role of the lecturer from the lone marker of a text to that of a higher-level "editor" and the role of students from authors to “reviewers" in an inclusive process. While I have designed the model for and use it in the context of information systems (IS) education, it will be applicable in higher education more broadly

An Approach to Open Resource-Based View

Traditional resource-based theories explain competitive advantages and resulting rents of firm through their ability to protect valuable resources. We discuss deficiencies of these theories with regard to accounting for firm’s success through opening valuable resources to the public or getting involved in value creation processes using open resources. We develop a matrix framework as a first step to an open resource-based approach. On basis of this framework we show how IBM and Facebook successfully increase their overall value creation potential by the means of open resources

Social Media Around the GLOBE

Building on the GLOBE study of cultural values, this article explores the impact of societal culture on organizational social media use. The analysis reported in this article is based on data collected from the Fortune Global 500 organizations regarding their use of six different types of external social media. The results of the analysis indicate that societal culture has to be considered an important factor for organizational social media use

How and Why Organizations Use Social Media: Five Use Types and Their Relation to Absorptive Capacity

In this paper, we examine the relation between social media use and the absorptive capacity of organisations. Over the past ten years, many organisations have systematically adopted social media. Trade press and consulting companies often claim that the systematic use of social media increases the performance of organisations. However, such claims are typically neither empirically grounded nor theoretically examined. In this paper, based on key informant interviews at 20 organisations, we examine these claims empirically and theoretically. Firstly, we examine the ways in which social media are used by organisations. We identify five different social media use types that support different organisational purposes (broadcast, dialogue, collaboration, knowledge management and sociability). Secondly, we analyse how these five social media use types relate to organisations’ absorptive capacity. We find that particular social media use types (e.g., dialogue) support organisations’ absorptive capacity and, ultimately, their performance although others (e.g., sociability) do not