ACM article on Social Media Use and Potential

"Social media use and potential in business-to-business companies' innovation" by Hannu Kärkkäinen, Jari Jussila, and Jaani Väisänen of the Tampere University of Technology, Tampere, Finland, looks into the issue of how social media is used by B2B companies and compares it to B2C companies.

Overall, businesses are well aware of the potential for social networks to be used for brand building and lead generation, but the actual use of social media is much less than might be expected from the stated interest of the companies. The main problems in integrating social media into a company's business model were difficulties assessing the ROI and in understanding the exact possibilities of social media in practice. About 90% of respondents indicated that their company offered no formal training or guidelines for the use of social media, even though between half and a quarter of companies agreed that social media could help them discover customer demands, shorten product development time, and save costs.

I think the overall takeaway point of this paper was that the pragmatics of social media adoption is still very much a developing area, and I think it illustrates the importance of having metrics to quantify the impact of adopting any business practice.

Article accesses online through the UA library system at:
http://dl.acm.org.ezproxy2.library.arizona.edu/citation.cfm?id=1930488.1930536&coll=DL&dl=ACM&CFID=41287953&CFTOKEN=37394128