Collins College of Business Magazine

W hat do Phillips 66, the United Way, Walmart, and the Tulsa Zoo have in common? They are all organizations that have embraced social media as a means to interact with customers and other stakeholders. Social media platforms provide near-instant access to vast amounts of information and people, allowing organizations to quickly disseminate information, collaborate with others, enhance worker productivity, and build relationships with current and future customers. Having a social media presence has become pervasive for firms in all types of industries, and the question is now how to tap social media's full potential. For firms, simply having a Facebook account or a Twitter handle is not enough: This is only the first small step toward real - izing sustained business value from the platform. Extracting larger benefits from social media is part of a process whereby value is created jointly by the long-term, continuous engagement between the firms and its followers. To engage effectively on any social media platform, one must have at least a basic understanding of the social norms associated with that specific medium. Each social media platform has different usage norms and interactive cultures that have formed around features embedded in the technology; e.g. "liking" on Facebook, re-tweeting on Twitter, and "pinning" on Pinterest. These are forms of social norms, or unwritten rules of conduct in a network or group. Yet, some firms follow these social norms while others do not, and following these social norms is not always indicative of a firm's successful use of a given social media platform. Along with a colleague from the University of Richmond, I explored why this may be the case. We first investigated the propensity of firms to follow the social norms associated with a social media platform and then empirically tested whether following these social norms led to greater long-term success. We focused our research on Twitter, one of the largest social media platforms with over 200 million active users per month. Organizations initially create value when they post original content in the form of short 140 or fewer-characters messages known as "tweets." The real long-term value, however, is created when original tweets are re-tweeted by others, generating a valuable "network effect" allowing firms to diffuse information throughout the Twitter platform. Our research focused on examining two potential factors that may impact the successful long-term use of Twitter by firms – a firm's status in its particular marketplace and the primary posting platform. For the latter, there are numerous ways for organizations to interact with Twitter: directly on the Twitter application via the website or Tweetdeck; through professional social media platforms, such as HootSuite and Sprout Social; or through other platforms, such as embedded web page links or via Facebook. Status is a social characteristic defined as the unearned ascrip - tion of social rank. A firm's status influences its competitiveness in its marketplace and often defines what is considered acceptable or unacceptable behavior. Previous research on status indicates that firms that rank in the middle amongst their peers are more likely to follow group norms than their high and low status peers. Previous studies in social media have not evaluated the potential impact of status on successful use of such technology, so we focused our efforts in this area. To test these hypotheses, we analyzed Twitter activity for U.S. colleges and universities for the 2012 calendar year. The status of each institution was determined using the ranking presented in U.S. News and World Report. In total, we analyzed the Twitter activity for 273 schools, encompassing over 100,000 tweets. We found that the status of schools relative to their peers does affect their following of the norms of social media. As predicted, universities ranked as middle-status were most likely to follow norms by retweeting more each month than the high-status and low-status universities. The study also found that some institutions might benefit from following or deviating from the re-tweeting norms of Twitter based upon their status relative to their peers. The study found that highly ranked universities were penalized the most for retweeting too much. Conversely, the study found that middle and lower status universities can benefit by retweeting more than similarly ranked peers up to a point. For all status groups, there is a breakpoint where retweeting too much has a detrimental effect by providing too much noise for their followers. The key is to understand which status group an organization belongs in and adjust to the norms of that group. Unfortunately, these norms are not clearly codified, and it takes "living" in the culture of the social media platform to understand them. Our results also indicate that institutions that interact directly with Twitter are more likely to follow the norms of retweeting, and thus be more successful in using the platform. It appears that when users distance themselves from Twitter by using intermediaries or professional services, they are incidentally limiting themselves from being exposed to the nuanced and changing norms of Twitter. The biggest takeaway from the study is this: Companies and organizations using Twitter can maximize their performance on the platform by understanding their status in the marketplace and behaving accordingly. Sal Aurigemma, Assistant Professor of MIS & Organizational Status Social Media: Who you Are Matters (So Behave Accordingly) Faculty Research S U M M E R 2 0 1 4 2 3

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