Coordinating Social Media Management Interfaces Across the Organization

Abstract

To establish a holistic framework for approaching social media management that offers a way to approach new, amplified and emerging interfaces affecting organizations. We apply Porter's historic value chain model as a scaffold to approach a holistic understanding of social media management and organize highly cited concepts related to social media management from the fields of IT and Corporate Communication. We find that classifying current studies in relation to secondary and primary activities from an historic value chain scaffold enables researchers to define and classify interfaces that can inform our understanding of social media management in a holistic manner. From an activity perspective, both primary and secondary activities related to social media can be argued to have interfaces with social media platforms, participants and audiences. In addition, interfaces enabled by social media technology affordances can be classified as new, amplified or emergent. Using a historic approach to organizational activities for organizing social media research enables researchers and social media managers to work with social media management strategies at a more detailed and nuanced level, taking types of activities as well as types of activities into account. This paper offers a cross disciplinary perspective connecting research from Corporate Communication and IT fields-both fields that attend to organizations in holistic manners, yet focus on different types of activities due to their disciplinary frames of reference. This combined perspective enables a dynamic framework for developing holistic approaches to social media management.