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Transformative: Social media throughout the firm November 5, 2014
If your company has a social media manager, chances are that person
reports into the marketing department. But, the marketing department
is not necessarily the only department that should be using social
media, according to Bin Gu, a professor of information systems at the
W. P. Carey School of Business.
If your company has a social media manager, chances are, that person
reports into the marketing department. Given that the Pew Research
Center
found 72 percent of online adults are active on some form of social
networking site, marketing is an appropriate home for a company‘s
social media initiatives.
But, it‘s not necessarily the only department that should be using
social media, according to Bin Gu, a professor of information systems
at the W. P. Carey School of Business.
A large portion of Gu‘s research centers around social media, and his
investigations lead him to call this phenomenon a ―disruptive
innovation‖ because it breaks barriers both within firms and between
firms and customers. Among other changes, he notes that now
―customers and the general public have become part of the production
function‖ for firms. Businesses will see social media as more than a
way to get things sold. It‘s
also a way to get things done, he says.
R&D: Tapping into the wisdom of the world
Innovation is on Gu‘s list of great things firms are doing with social
media,
and he‘s recently turned his investigative eye toward the world of
crowdsourcing. Unlike outsourcing, where firms turn a function over
to another company to manage, crowdsourcing is the act of posting a
problem or question on the Internet and letting the masses online find
an answer.
The process lets firms ―tap into the wisdom of external people,‖ Gu
notes. ―The fi