The Perceived Business Value of Social Media at Work

Social Media is a new phenomenon that impacts businesses, society and individuals. Social media has swept into the business world, disrupting businesses, bringing new opportunities and challenges. The use of social media in organizations has the potential to shape the “future of the work”. Both consultancy reports and scholarly articles highlight and discuss the new opportunities and organizational benefits provided by social media to change the current top-down (i.e. initiated by management) business model to a more collaborative and bottom-up (i.e. initiated by employees) approach. Such a model is customizable to specific user needs, empowering employees to design specific workflows thus helping them to work more effectively. Using social media, personal knowledge can be synergized into collective knowledge through social collaborative processes that may facilitate externalization of knowledge, fostering creativity and innovation. All these processes have the potential to lead to knowledge creation through interaction and collaborative processes and thereby increase companies’ competitiveness. However the successful deployment of social media for internal communication and facilitation of knowledge sharing and collaboration in organizations is difficult. Based on quantitative as well as qualitative data from 13 Danish organizations, we investigate the following research question: What is the business value of social media in organizations as perceived by the employees? Based on the data analysis, the paper derives a model of factors associated with the perceived business value of social media.