Exploring Strategic Organizational Engagement in Social Media: A Revelatory Case

There has been little theorizing in information systems (IS) or management literature to inform organizational strategies for social media engagement. Aral et al. (2013) lament the dearth of scholarly work focused on understanding organizations’ high-level social media strategies. In this research, we describe our case research to develop an empirically informed understanding of strategic organizational engagement in social media to advance organizational goals. We present an in-depth case study of strategic social media engagement at a successful multi-national business and IT consulting firm who routinely develops and deploys social media strategies to advance organizational goals. We situate our interpretation in the dynamic capabilities perspective, and present a revelatory case well-suited to developing an empirically-informed understanding of strategic social media engagement to advance organizational goals. We develop an analytic perspective of social media based as social systems, and describe topical collectivities as strategically important members of their ontology.

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