IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/eee/bushor/v53y2010i1p59-68.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Users of the world, unite! The challenges and opportunities of Social Media

Author

Listed:
  • Kaplan, Andreas M.
  • Haenlein, Michael

Abstract

The concept of Social Media is top of the agenda for many business executives today. Decision makers, as well as consultants, try to identify ways in which firms can make profitable use of applications such as Wikipedia, YouTube, Facebook, Second Life, and Twitter. Yet despite this interest, there seems to be very limited understanding of what the term "Social Media" exactly means; this article intends to provide some clarification. We begin by describing the concept of Social Media, and discuss how it differs from related concepts such as Web 2.0 and User Generated Content. Based on this definition, we then provide a classification of Social Media which groups applications currently subsumed under the generalized term into more specific categories by characteristic: collaborative projects, blogs, content communities, social networking sites, virtual game worlds, and virtual social worlds. Finally, we present 10 pieces of advice for companies which decide to utilize Social Media.

Suggested Citation

  • Kaplan, Andreas M. & Haenlein, Michael, 2010. "Users of the world, unite! The challenges and opportunities of Social Media," Business Horizons, Elsevier, vol. 53(1), pages 59-68, January.
    • Handle: RePEc:eee:bushor:v:53:y:2010:i:1:p:59-68
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0007-6813(09)00123-2
    Download Restriction: Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Kaplan, Andreas M. & Haenlein, Michael, 2009. "The fairyland of Second Life: Virtual social worlds and how to use them," Business Horizons, Elsevier, vol. 52(6), pages 563-572, November.
    2. Richard L. Daft & Robert H. Lengel, 1986. "Organizational Information Requirements, Media Richness and Structural Design," Management Science, INFORMS, vol. 32(5), pages 554-571, May.
    3. Fama, Eugene F, 1970. "Efficient Capital Markets: A Review of Theory and Empirical Work," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 25(2), pages 383-417, May.
    4. Muniz, Albert M, Jr & O'Guinn, Thomas C, 2001. "Brand Community," Journal of Consumer Research, Journal of Consumer Research Inc., vol. 27(4), pages 412-432, March.
    5. James C. Ward & Amy L. Ostrom, 2006. "Complaining to the Masses: The Role of Protest Framing in Customer-Created Complaint Web Sites," Journal of Consumer Research, Journal of Consumer Research Inc., vol. 33(2), pages 220-230, July.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Kaplan, Andreas & Haenlein, Michael, 2014. "Collaborative projects (social media application): About Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia," Business Horizons, Elsevier, vol. 57(5), pages 617-626.
    2. Labrecque, Lauren I. & vor dem Esche, Jonas & Mathwick, Charla & Novak, Thomas P. & Hofacker, Charles F., 2013. "Consumer Power: Evolution in the Digital Age," Journal of Interactive Marketing, Elsevier, vol. 27(4), pages 257-269.
    3. Eisenbeiss, Maik & Blechschmidt, Boris & Backhaus, Klaus & Freund, Philipp Alexander, 2012. "“The (Real) World Is Not Enough:” Motivational Drivers and User Behavior in Virtual Worlds," Journal of Interactive Marketing, Elsevier, vol. 26(1), pages 4-20.
    4. Weijo, Henri & Bean, Jonathan & Rintamäki, Jukka, 2019. "Brand community coping," Journal of Business Research, Elsevier, vol. 94(C), pages 128-136.
    5. Kaplan, Andreas M. & Haenlein, Michael, 2011. "The early bird catches the news: Nine things you should know about micro-blogging," Business Horizons, Elsevier, vol. 54(2), pages 105-113, March.
    6. Kaplan, Andreas M. & Haenlein, Michael, 2011. "The early bird catches the news: Nine things you should know about micro-blogging," Business Horizons, Elsevier, vol. 54(2), pages 105-113.
    7. Korschun, Daniel & Du, Shuili, 2013. "How virtual corporate social responsibility dialogs generate value: A framework and propositions," Journal of Business Research, Elsevier, vol. 66(9), pages 1494-1504.
    8. Mahr, Dominik & Lievens, Annouk, 2012. "Virtual lead user communities: Drivers of knowledge creation for innovation," Research Policy, Elsevier, vol. 41(1), pages 167-177.
    9. Bolton, Ruth & Saxena-Iyer, Shruti, 2009. "Interactive Services: A Framework, Synthesis and Research Directions," Journal of Interactive Marketing, Elsevier, vol. 23(1), pages 91-104.
    10. Bacile, Todd J. & Wolter, Jeremy S. & Allen, Alexis M. & Xu, Pei, 2018. "The Effects of Online Incivility and Consumer-to-Consumer Interactional Justice on Complainants, Observers, and Service Providers During Social Media Service Recovery," Journal of Interactive Marketing, Elsevier, vol. 44(C), pages 60-81.
    11. Gensler, Sonja & Völckner, Franziska & Liu-Thompkins, Yuping & Wiertz, Caroline, 2013. "Managing Brands in the Social Media Environment," Journal of Interactive Marketing, Elsevier, vol. 27(4), pages 242-256.
    12. Stock-Homburg, Ruth & Özbek-Potthoff, Gülden & Wagner, Marina Melanie, 2012. "Soziale Medien im Personalmanagement," Die Unternehmung - Swiss Journal of Business Research and Practice, Nomos Verlagsgesellschaft mbH & Co. KG, vol. 66(1), pages 28-48.
    13. Nadeem, Waqar & Tan, Teck Ming & Tajvidi, Mina & Hajli, Nick, 2021. "How do experiences enhance brand relationship performance and value co-creation in social commerce? The role of consumer engagement and self brand-connection," Technological Forecasting and Social Change, Elsevier, vol. 171(C).
    14. Stevens, Jennifer L. & Spaid, Brian I. & Breazeale, Michael & Esmark Jones, Carol L., 2018. "Timeliness, transparency, and trust: A framework for managing online customer complaints," Business Horizons, Elsevier, vol. 61(3), pages 375-384.
    15. Olaf Maecker & Christian Barrot & Jan U. Becker, 2016. "The effect of social media interactions on customer relationship management," Business Research, Springer;German Academic Association for Business Research, vol. 9(1), pages 133-155, April.
    16. David M. Ritzwoller & Joseph P. Romano, 2019. "Uncertainty in the Hot Hand Fallacy: Detecting Streaky Alternatives to Random Bernoulli Sequences," Papers 1908.01406, arXiv.org, revised Apr 2021.
    17. Shazia Ghani, 2011. "A re-visit to Minsky after 2007 financial meltdown," Post-Print halshs-01027435, HAL.
    18. Steininger, Lea & Hesse, Casimir, 2024. "Buying into new ideas: The ECB’s evolving justification of unlimited liquidity," Department of Economics Working Paper Series 357, WU Vienna University of Economics and Business.
    19. Christiane Goodfellow & Dirk Schiereck & Steffen Wippler, 2013. "Are behavioural finance equity funds a superior investment? A note on fund performance and market efficiency," Journal of Asset Management, Palgrave Macmillan, vol. 14(2), pages 111-119, April.
    20. Cagli, Efe Caglar & Taskin, Dilvin & Evrim Mandaci, Pınar, 2019. "The short- and long-run efficiency of energy, precious metals, and base metals markets: Evidence from the exponential smooth transition autoregressive models," Energy Economics, Elsevier, vol. 84(C).

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:eee:bushor:v:53:y:2010:i:1:p:59-68. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Catherine Liu (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.elsevier.com/locate/bushor .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.