I really enjoyed one of the articles I read for my last post, so I decided to begin with another by the same author. It relates to social media, which is a passion of mine, so I was quite excited to delve into it.
According to the paper, Starbucks uses social media in a variety of ways to disperse information, encourage active engagement, and even redefine the role of the consumer in the company. This has major implications for any service-based organization-- in order to form a positive association in the minds of consumers and gain their business, it helps to interact with them outside the physical store. Social media is a huge part of mainstream life now, and social networks are huge breeding grounds for unconventional information behaviors. Like any new technology, appropriate use of it can be immensely helpful to businesses.
After Chua, I moved on to something a little meatier. Nanahapiet discusses the idea of "social capital" as an agent for the creation and dispersal of "intellectual capital." Essentially, this means that within systems involving people working together, some people have higher status (formal and informal), and those people are more efficient innovators and more likely to have an audience within the system to share their innovations. In some ways, this is intuitive, but as models of human behavior go, it's admirably clean. This provides a handy illustration of the advantages of organizations-- free agents will neither produce the creativity of work as those well-situated in organizations nor have a mechanism in place to share their methods with others doing the same kind of work.
This led me nicely into the third article I chose to deal with today-- Nonaka's piece on organizational knowledge creation. This is the densest paper of the three for this post, but its argument boils down to the idea that proper use of organizations can help new knowledge grow and improve as it spreads. In this way, as above, knowledge creation is interactive and dependent on a larger community to thrive.
A few links of note: this Huffington Post article on tips for organizational work; my classmate Kelly's thoroughly entertaining post about social media and disaster; Rebecca's post which uses the same article to no less thoughtful and entertaining effect.
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Readings Discussed:
Chua, A. Y. K., & Banerjee, S. (2013). Customer knowledge management via social media: The case of Starbucks. Journal of Knowledge Management, Vol. 17(2), 237-249. doi:10.1108/13673271311315196
Nahapiet, J., & Ghoshal, S. (1998). Social capital, intellectual capital, and the organizational advantage. The Academy of Management Review, 23(2), 242-266. URL:http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2307/259373
Nonaka, I. (1994). A dynamic theory of organizational knowledge creation. Organization Science, 5(1), 14-37. URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2307/2635068
I was very impressed with the way Starbucks has incorporated social media into their marketing campaigns. They are one company who seems to have fully grasped the benefits of social media in relation to marketing and connecting with their consumers, and integrated it seamlessly into the advertising and promotion of their products.
ReplyDeleteThe Nahapiet & Ghoshal article sounds interesting, I've got it lined up to read here in a week or so. I have heard of social capital, but I always thought of it in terms of popularity. To use Mean Girls for an example (b/c why not?):
ReplyDelete"Regina George had all the social capital she needed to run the school."
But it does make sense that "Nahapiet & Ghoshal see social capital as an agent for the creation and dispersal of intellectual capital," because it is sort of a similar thing, they're just looking at it in terms of academia and scholarly learning versus a silly movie example. For instance, the 3 phds you have give you the social capital that makes people take note of your opinion on the topic.
I think those things are very much related-- your "popularity" in professional circles is very tied to the perceived quality of your work.And-- even in Mean Girls-- how popular you are has a huge impact on the spread of your ideas. Look at the shirts with the boob cut-outs!
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