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This chapter investigates the role of social media in enhancing the interactions between customers and event management. It is based on a field study conducted on three UK horse racing events using a set of interviews and questionnaires to probe the views of the audience and the managers. Findings underscore the growing importance of social media, which are progressively embraced by consumers as part of their daily communication mix. Horse racing customers are likely to use social media to leave event feedback. While there is demand for a reply, interviewed managers admit a weakness regarding the use of social media to gain post-event feedback − which can act as an important means to engage and co-create value with customers.

This paper aims to examine the relationship between the interaction of the social media manager’s customer orientation and the service climate perceived by supervisors, on the customer’s perception of brand authenticity and, through it, on the willingness to pay a price premium.

This study uses triadic data from 200 social media followers, 20 social media managers and 20 supervisors from a range of industries.

The findings show that the customer orientation of the brand social media managers interacts with their work context to influence social media followers’ perceptions of brand authenticity, and ultimately, their willingness to pay a premium price. Finally, product involvement moderates the relationship between brand authenticity and willingness to pay a premium price.

This study shows how and when the disposition of brand social media managers affects the attitudes and intentions of the social media followers. Further research should continue this novel line of research and explore in greater depth the impact of social media managers and their environments.

Social media managers’ values should fit those of their organization. This organization-person fit reflects on social media and improves social media followers’ perceptions of brand authenticity and, consequently, their willingness to pay a premium price.

Leveraging participation in social media is currently a key issue for firms. However, the internal determinants of successful social media usage have received limited attention from researchers. Therefore, this research contributes to the social media literature by suggesting the need to consider the characteristics of social media managers and their context to promote the outcomes of social media usage, specifically brand authenticity and willingness to pay a premium price.

The rise of social media such as Facebook and Twitter has provided employees with means to share work-related information. Increasingly, social media governance policies are implemented to negotiate the risks and opportunities of such behaviors. The purpose of this paper is to unveil the motivations behind managers’ attempts to govern these behaviors.

Semi-structured interviews were conducted with ten communication managers of various organizations. Higgins’ regulatory focus theory (Higgins, 1997) was used to examine whether managers adopted a prevention or promotion focus to social media, and whether regulatory focus affected the measures taken toward social media governance.

Prevention and promotion foci were both observed among managers, and differed per communication model. Managers who employed dialogic models of communication were primarily promotion-focused and emphasized opportunities to improve stakeholder relations, while managers who employed one-way models were primarily prevention-focused and highlighted the risks of social media (e.g. the risk of employees publishing messages that contradict corporate communication and confuse stakeholders). Social media governance differed depending on regulatory focus. In the prevention scheme managers usually attempted to regain control by restricting social media to private use only, while in the promotion focus managers trained and facilitated employees for work-related social media use, to various extends.

By examining the interplay of regulatory focus, communication models and governance, this paper sheds light on the rationale behind social media governance policies that are implemented in organizations.

Social media management is an emerging profession that is growing as companies increasingly adopt social media. The purpose of this paper is to analyze social media managers’ personal branding.

In-depth qualitative data is drawn from 20 semi-structured interviews with social media managers and supported by three years of orienting fieldwork in Toronto, Canada.

Social media managers are responsible for managing and executing organizations’ brands and presence on social media and digital platforms. As lead users of social media, social media managers provide critical insight into the emerging practices of personal branding on social media. “The future audience” is introduced to describe how individuals project a curated brand for all future unknown and unanticipated audiences, which emphasizes a professional identity. Due to workplace uncertainty, social media managers embody the mentality of being “always-on-the-job-market”, which is a driver for personal branding in their attempt to gain or maintain employment.

While personal branding is largely discussed by industry professionals, there is a need for empirical research on personal branding that examines how various employee groups experience personal branding. This research fills this gap by analyzing how people working in social media brand their identity and how their personal branding is used to market themselves to gain and maintain employment. The development of “the future audience” and “always-on-the-job-market” can be used to understand other professions and experiences of personal branding.

Female managers have numerous vulnerabilities related to their reputation and career progression in addition to social, sexual and discriminatory vulnerabilities. In organizational settings, antagonized subordinates, peers or superiors can exploit their vulnerabilities through negative use of social media. For optimal performance and inclusion in organizational activities, it is essential to protect female managers against exploitation. Social media can be used for this purpose and dictates an investigation into it as an agent to reduce vulnerabilities and enhance inclusion of female managers.

Qualitative data collected through 25 in-depth semi-structured interviews from respondents belonging to five different organizations has been used in this exploratory study. Thematic analysis was done to reach the underlying structures of subjective responses of female managers.

This study finds that positive use of social media is effective in reducing vulnerabilities and female managers feel more included and protected against exploitation in inclusive organizations. The study presents a holistic view of vulnerabilities of female managers, various forms taken by negative use of social media, mechanics of positive use of social media and pathways to inclusive organization through reduction of vulnerabilities.

Availability of limited time, resources and a single cultural context were few limitations. The study highlights an important area for further research indicating psychological trauma of victimized female managers forcing them to feel excluded from the organization.

This study will enhance understanding of practitioners about vulnerabilities of female managers and its likely accentuation through negative use of social media. In addition, they can learn the use of social media for reducing vulnerabilities and enhancing inclusion of female managers. This study also shed light on methodology to handle the situation in the face of all forms of negative use of social media.

Female managers are highly vulnerable to exploitation through use of social media by antagonized groups and individuals who can easily attack their reputation and image. This study is an effort to reduce vulnerabilities of business women. Additionally, it is also aimed at enhancing inclusion of females in organizational activities to counter their isolation and discrimination on the basis of gender.

The issue of negative use of social media has not received attention of scholars. Being a research gap, exploratory study based on qualitative responses has been conducted to explore different facets of the issue. In-depth interviews have been conducted to collect primary data.

The purpose of this study is to evaluate the factors related to the adoption of social media by women entrepreneurial small businesses (ESBs).

Using a structured survey instrument, this study gathered data from 101 women entrepreneurs in Yemen. Descriptive statistics were used to analyze the data.

The results confirm that social media has been widely applied by women ESBs in Yemen and has made a significant contribution to different business strategies and processes, mainly marketing, promotion and communication. Social media adoption is linked mainly with nontechnical obstacles and challenges, in specific, those “soft” factors such as management attitude, as well as “hard” technical obstacles and challenges involving cost and other practical aspects regarding social media nature.

This study contributes to the increase in awareness of the impact of social media among female ESB owners. A greater understanding of the impact of social media will eventually lead to better use of the tool to increase performance.

This study highlights the perceived benefits and challenges that give Yemeni female business owners strong decision-making power in their businesses. This study provides insight into the numerous drivers that affect owners/managers’ decisions to adopt and continuously use social media in the future.

Although social media use at work has made great impact on employee work performance, little is known about the effect of social media use at work on construction employees, especially construction managers. In this way, the purpose of this study aims to investigate the impact of social media use at work on construction managers' work performance based on the enabler-process-intermediate outcome-performance framework.

This study adopts the knowledge seeker's perspective to empirically investigate the mechanism through which social media use at work impacts construction managers' work performance. Questionnaire survey was conducted with 210 construction managers to test the research model proposed in this study. A component-based structural equation modeling technique was employed to analyze the data.

Results show that social media use at work positively influences knowledge acquisition both internally and externally, and knowledge acquisition promotes task self-efficacy and creativity, which in turn improve construction managers' work performance. In addition, the interaction of task self-efficacy and creativity is found to negatively influence work performance.

These findings contribute to a comprehensive understanding about the impact of social media use at work on construction managers' work performance. This research also provides informative insights for practitioners on how to improve work performance.

This study examines the conditions when “managerial perception of the contribution of social media” (SMC) enhances and inhibits entrepreneurially oriented small and medium-size enterprises' (SMEs') ability for new product introductions (NPI) to the market. We also propose that while firm proactiveness enhances the rate of NPI, managers' risk-taking attitude hurts the process even when managerial perceptions of social media use are high.

This study uses the survey data collected from 322 SMEs in the US to examine the theoretical model. By adopting the partial least square (PLS-SEM) technique, the direct and moderating effects among the SMC, proactive behavior and risk-taking attitude on NPI are explored under dynamic and stable market conditions.

Empirical findings show that although SMC has a significant positive influence on the rate of NPI in case of SMEs', if the managers are risk-takers themselves, then social media use can distract them, make them overly adventurous trying to introduce too many products and hurt SMEs' innovation efforts with less NPI. We show that SMEs' entrepreneurial orientation (EO) has a differential impact on SMC-NPI relationship, especially in dynamic market conditions.

The findings provide practical evidence that SMEs get benefitted when their managers perceive that the contributions from social media are positive for their firm. Contrary to the prior understanding of high risk and high return, managers' risk-taking attitude hurts SMEs innovation efforts. SMEs being resource-constrained, it is practically vital for them to be taking less risk while developing new products.

This research synthesizes the insights of the new and emerging “Strategy-as-practice view” and “Behavioral theory of the firm” to empirically examine how managerial perceptions on social media use shape firms' key strategic activity, NPI. This research also highlights the dark side of firm characteristics, such as managerial risk-taking attitude for SMEs.

Although social media has been increasingly applied and valued in the construction industry, there has been little evidence revealing the influence mechanism of social media use in the construction context. In this way, this paper aims to explore how different purposes of social media use affect project performance from a project manager's perspective.

Drawing on the mechanism–outcome–performance framework, this paper developed a research model to figure out the mechanism through which work-oriented and socialization-oriented social media use influences construction project performance. The empirical data were collected from a survey of 249 construction project managers, and the structural equation modeling technique was applied to test the proposed model.

Results indicate that both work-oriented and socialization-oriented social media use promote knowledge acquisition and project social capital, which both further positively impact the project performance. Additionally, the negative moderating role of information overload is identified on the relationship between social media use and knowledge acquisition.

This study fulfills the need for an in-depth investigation of social media use on construction project performance, contributing to the project management and social media literature. Furthermore, this study provides recommendations for project managers to advance social media applications in the construction domain.

The purpose of this study is to investigate the influence of social media, perception, readiness and usage on sustainable growth of micro and small enterprises (MSEs) in Uganda.

This study is cross-sectional and adopted a mixed method approach. Data was gathered through a questionnaire survey of 212 business owner–managers that are members of the Uganda Small Scale Industries Association (USSIA) and engaging 8 business managers in the in-depth interviews to support and strengthen the quantitative results. Data analysis was done using statistical package for social sciences (SPSS.24) and Atlas ti.8.

The study reveals that social media perception, readiness and usage positively influence sustainable growth of MSEs in Uganda. However, the insufficient soft and technical skills, lack of devices such as computers and smartphones and the high cost of Internet data undermine the usage of social media by business owner–managers for sustainable growth of their businesses.

The findings demonstrate what policymakers, social media operators and business owner–managers need to do to enhance integration of social media platforms and channels into the operations of MSEs in Uganda.

This study adds to existing literature on social media technology in MSEs with evidence from Uganda. The study results are likely to foster usage of social media as policymakers and social media providers will come up with appropriate strategies to unlock the social media potential of the business owner–managers for sustainable business growth in Uganda.