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The purpose of this paper is to clarify the aims, monitoring methods and challenges of social media monitoring from the perspective of international companies. Trends in the literature are also investigated.

Based on a systematic literature review, 30 key articles from 2008 to 2012 were further analysed.

International companies need real-time monitoring software, expertise and dynamic visualization to facilitate early detection and prognoses supporting strategy making. This is a costly affair, prompting questions about return on investment. A recent trend in the research literature concerns the development of models describing how issues spread in social media with the aim of facilitating prognoses.

The online databases used comprised refereed peer-reviewed scientific articles. Books were not included in the search process.

Because information spreads fast in social media and affects international companies, they need to identify issues early, in order to monitor and predict their growth. This paper discusses the difficulties posed by this objective.

Social media monitoring is a young research area and research on the topic has been conducted from many different perspectives. Therefore, this paper brings together current insights geared towards corporate communication by international companies.

The purpose of this paper is to find out how issue management and media monitoring is exercised in the digital age to anticipate crises. More specifically, it was investigated how these practices differ across communication professionals, organizations, and sectors in the Netherlands. Organizations are nowadays confronted with a fast-changing environment. Anticipating dicey issues, being in control of the flow of messages, and managing various stakeholders on diverse channels becomes a primary concern for organizations these days.

The study relies on qualitative interviews with 17 communication professionals working in various industrial sectors in the Netherlands. Professionals were recruited from distinct organizations and from diverse sectors, including media, public affairs, technology, consultancy, municipality, lottery, oil/gas, cultural, insurance, and the financial industry. The interview data were analyzed by means of an inductive analysis and in-depth reading.

Practitioners seem to acknowledge the importance of issue monitoring. However, professionals differ with regard to their expertise in online media monitoring, depending on the sector they work for. Stakeholder mapping and the monitoring of competitors has been found to be crucial for issue management, but also to vary among large and small organizations. Eventually, monitoring in times of crises was seen indispensable. It also has the potential to empower practitioners within their organizations.

New technologies, external services, and automized monitoring processes have facilitated issue monitoring for professionals to a great extent, making it possible to analyze great amounts of data efficiently in short time and with fewer resources. Furthermore, the focus of media monitoring is increasingly moving toward the online sphere, including the active engagement of stakeholders. Eventually, the empowerment of practitioners through online monitoring practices in times of crises can be considered as a further step toward the positioning of communication professionals within the dominant coalition.

Digital self-expression, recently one of the most important research themes, is currently under-researched. In this context, this study aims to propose a parsimonious research model of self-extension tendency, its drivers and its outcomes. The model is tested in the context of social media engagement intentions (liking, sharing and commenting) with focal brands and across individualist versus collectivist cultures.

The model is tested in two individualist cultures (N = 230 and 232) and two collectivist cultures (N = 232 and 237) by conducting surveys in four countries (Australia, USA, Qatar and India). Nike and Ray-Ban are the focal brands studied, with Facebook serving as the targeted social networking site (SNS) platform.

Self-monitoring and self-esteem are found to drive the self-extension tendency across cultures, with stronger effects in the individualist culture than in the collectivist culture. The self-extension tendency has a relatively stronger positive influence on social media engagement intentions in the individualist culture than in the collectivist culture. This tendency is also found to mediate the link between self-monitoring, self-extension and social media engagement intentions across both cultures, albeit in different ways. In collectivist culture, self-monitoring’s influence on the self-extension tendency is moderated by public self-consciousness. The study’s findings have important theoretical and practical implications. In individualist culture, self-monitoring’s influence on the self-extension tendency is moderated by public self-consciousness.

The present findings confirm that the tendency to incorporate the brand into one’s self-concept and to further extend the self is indeed contingent on one’s cultural background. The role of public self-consciousness may vary between individualist and collectivist cultures, something recommended by past research for empirical testing.

Managers can leverage this research model to entice pro-brand social media engagement by nurturing consumers’ digital selves in terms of maneuvering their self-extension tendency and its drivers, namely, self-monitoring and self-esteem. Second, promoting the self-extension tendency and its drivers varies across cultures, with this finding offering practical cultural nuances supporting marketing managers’ decisions.

This is one of the pioneering studies that tests a cross-cultural parsimonious model based on theories of self-extension, self-monitoring and self-esteem, especially within the context of brand engagement intentions on an SNS platform.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the processes whereby organisational actors can seize the opportunities opened up through social media, and the way in which the relative information is managed. This allows these actors to move their occupational boundaries, exploiting the information for performance measurement purposes. The investigation was carried out within an organisational setting, where most occupational dynamics take place. The focus was on the role of artefacts within these occupational dynamics and the analysis drew upon the notion of boundary objects.

The research was based on case studies involving two organisations that make use of social media within and across several departments. The authors conducted semi-structured interviews with social media managers, department managers, analysts and financial controllers and senior executives. The results of the qualitative analysis of the interviews were completed with secondary sources of information, company reports, communications, public policies, codes of conduct and social media platform analyses.

This paper has implications for accounting studies, showing how marketing and communications managers entering the field of performance management can take the lead in social media management by collecting information from social media, constructing indicators and gaining ground in several decision-making centres. The findings highlight the role of new artefacts and organisational roles, whose purpose is to build a digital community. This process involves crossing the boundaries between internal functions and the inside and outside environment, with a driving phenomenon becoming visible: hybridisation. Faced with this change, reluctant accountants with a traditional mindset are more likely to observe the process at a distance, focusing more on their routine operations based on conventional data.

This paper shows that information derived from social media is already a reality that has gained significance through the construction of boundary objects. The paper highlights a driving phenomenon that is emerging in the surge to occupy the organisational terrain for controlling social media: that of hybridisation. The concept of hybridisation is not new in management accounting studies, but in this study can be applied to carrying out a joint analysis on both the boundary objects and their organisational trajectory. In the context of social media accounting, hybridisation is of central importance if both actors and objects are to be effectively positioned at its boundary.

This study aims to investigate the relationship between young people’s Conspicuous Donation Behaviour (CDB) on social media platforms and their offline donation behaviour, specifically intentions to donate and volunteer time. It also explores materialism, self-esteem and self-monitoring as CDB trait antecedents, as a form of conspicuous consumption on social media. Finally, it considers the influence of altruism on these relationships.

A survey was conducted of regular Facebook users mentioning a charity brand on Facebook in the past year. Data from 234 participants were analysed and hypotheses tested using structural equation modeling.

Results confirm two forms of CDB – self and other-oriented. Materialistic consumers are more likely to engage in both forms of CDB on Facebook. High self-esteem increases self-oriented CDB; high self-monitoring increases other-oriented CDB. Self-oriented CDB is positively associated with donation intentions, but other-oriented CDB is negatively associated. Findings reveal how altruism moderates this model.

Findings show how personality traits influence CDB and reveal the relationship between CDB, as virtual conspicuous consumption on social media platforms, and donation behaviour.

The study provides implications for managers about enhancing charitable donations through social media.

This is the first study to explore donation behaviour as a form of conspicuous consumption on social media, where virtual conspicuous consumption (i) does not require any offline consumption and (ii) may achieve the desired recognition, without any charitable act. It provides new insights into CDB, its antecedents and influence on donation behaviour.

This paper aims to discuss the individual participation and involvement affecting the user engagement in social media and to answer the following research questions: Is it possible to measure the individual participation and involvement of social media within organizations? Which factors should be analysed in order to increase the individual participation in social media? Which KPIs should be selected in order to increase the user ' s engagement and increase individual participation in social media? Can social media in a company be measured in terms of their impact on KM?

This paper presents a case study that describes how Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) are used to monitor and manage the applications of social technologies, which include many tools facilitating the participation and collaboration on the web. The case study was applied to the information and communication technology area of Eni S.p.A., which is an integrated energy company active in over 70 countries in the world.

Based on the indications obtained from the case study, a methodology is proposed to select and develop the appropriate KPIs in order to manage and monitor the application of social technologies. The methodology turned out to be able to monitor collaboration and knowledge sharing activities among employees and to incentivize participation and involvement of employees who use the company ' s social media.

Organizations can use the suggested methodology as a guideline for managing and monitoring social media inside a company. The possibility of continuously modifying the adopted social media tool by means of corrective actions together with the possibility of adapting the KPIs to new situations make the present methodology an efficient management approach to take on the multifaceted activities of a social media environment.

Few case studies dealing with the applications regarding the implementation and management of social technologies within organizations have been carried out. Similarly, even if some empirical studies have been proposed to analyse what motivates and prevents employees from sharing their knowledge through social media, there appears to be a lack of studies which have taken into consideration the evaluation of the actual benefits in terms of individual involvement and participation, knowledge sharing and increase in performance.

This study aims to use a social media management framework and strategic orientation framework to explore how small restaurants manage social media.

The authors content-analyzed social media activity and interviews with 14 managers of social media in small independent restaurants in the northeast region of the USA that employed fewer than 20 employees.

The results of the study show that most small restaurants can be classified as anarchic, hierarchical and conservative defenders, and that they mainly focus on promotional activities on social media. The majority use social media also to drive traffic to a restaurant and, thus, act as calculative pragmatists. Very few use social media strategically or creatively in any of the social media management stages, and very few monitor or use social media information to improve their operations.

This study shows that the adopted theoretical framework in this study for social media management helps analyze social media operations in small restaurants, points to the strategic orientations applied in small restaurants, shows the intricacies of each stage and helps show what small restaurants do well and how they can improve. Future research may use larger samples, investigate frameworks particularly relevant to small restaurants, such as the resource-based view (RBV) framework, and may focus on creative and diverse strategic approaches toward social media management for small establishments.

As customers continue shifting to social media and review sites, more restaurants may want to invest in developing more creative approaches toward social media and do it in more structured, integrated and continuous ways. The study describes a process they may want to follow and specific tactics that could be implemented to use social media more strategically in all stages of social media management.

Not only are small business establishments the backbone of the restaurant industry, but they also appeal to customers more than large chains. This study shows how these small businesses can utilize social media to attract more customers, engage them, learn about them and their competitive environment to market and improve their operations.

The authors focus on the supplier side of social media for restaurants, a perspective lacking in the literature, and specifically small restaurants that receive less attention in prior research. Few studies exist that explore how social media is incorporated in all stages of social media management. The study points to the unique challenges that small restaurants experience in the process of using social media for marketing, monitoring and using social media to improve their operations. The study uses a relatively large sample of qualitative interviews conducted with managers of small restaurants and a content analysis of their actual social media activity.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate how public relations practitioners view their role in guiding their organizations’ frontline (nonnominated) employees’ social media use and the tensions that organizations must navigate when they interact with their employees online.

This study utilizes in-depth interviews with 24 PR practitioners in the USA. Data were analyzed via grounded theory’s approach to open, axial, and select coding.

PR practitioners engage in three activities to guide employees’ social media use: serving as a reactive-technical resource; supporting employee communities; and responding to incidental monitoring of social media posts.

The study extends stakeholder theory by describing the normative expectations that are placed on employees when it comes to discussing the organization online.

Recommendations are offered for PR practitioners regarding the boundary-respecting management of nonnominated employees’ social media use.

Findings point to a greater understanding about frontline workers’ roles in supporting their organizations and the need for organizations to carefully explain social media policies.

Scholars have not fully explored the challenges that firms face when they seek to influence employees’ personal social networking activities. There is new insight about the ways in which organization can ethically engage with employees in digitally mediated spaces.

The present research aimed to identify the motivations, needs, wants, preferences and limitations of corporate professionals with regard to business social analytics.

Online interviews were conducted with 26 professionals the majority of whom work at the management level at 20 reputable corporations in Turkey. Both qualitative and quantitative data was collected during these interviews, which lasted an average of one hour.

The findings shed light on the motivations of corporate professionals for monitoring social media and other digital media, their perceived capability and limitations in doing so, the media that they monitor and wanted to monitor if possible, their criteria and processes for working with service providers in the field of business social analytics, their needs which are not fully met by service providers, their suggestions on service improvement and their reflections on how internal and external customer data can be analyzed with an integrated approach.

This research is an attempt to bridge the gap between the priorities of engineers who generate artificial intelligence for the purposes of social listening and analytics and the end users, e.g. corporate communication professionals. Only by doing so, this field, which is getting more and more important as people spend more time online, will reach its full potential and benefit corporations by providing fruitful insight upon which strategic steps can be taken.

This paper aims to demonstrate how the integration of netnography and business analytics can support companies in the process of value creation from social big data by leveraging on customer relationship management and customer knowledge management (CKM).

This paper adopts the methodology of a single case study by using desk analysis, netnography and business analytics. The context of analysis has been identified into the case of Aurora Company, a well-known producer of fountain pens.

The case demonstrates how the integration of big data analytics and netnography is relevant for the development of a customer relationship management strategy. The results obtained have been categorized according to the three main categories of customer knowledge, such as knowledge for, from and about customer.

This paper presents implications for the advancement of the theory on CKM by demonstrating, as the acquisition, storage and management of data generated by customers on social media require the adoption of a cross-disciplinary approach resulting from the integration of qualitative and quantitative approaches. The framework is structured as methodological tool to detect knowledge in virtual community.

Practical implications arise for managers and entrepreneurs in terms of value creation from knowledge assets generated on social big data through the management of the customers’ relationship and data-driven innovation patterns.

This paper offers an original contribution of integration of well-established research streams. The focus on the knowledge under the perspectives of information assets for, from and about customers in the debate on value creation and management of big data is an element of value offered by this study in addition to the comprehension of strategies of social customer relationship management as actual initiative embraced by a company in the leveraging of innovation and tradition.