기업의 소셜미디어 활용방안에 대한 연구

A Study on the Effective Utilization of Social Media in Organizations : A Focus on Twitter

As the number of smart phone users increases, many organizations begin to adopt social media rapidly to diversify communication channels with customers. Specifically, twitter, which supports instant and two-way communications between users and between organizations and users, has been adopted by many organizations as an efficient way not only to identify new customers but also to retain existing customers. However, little attention has been given to the issue on how organizations can effectively use twitter to improve customer satisfaction. To explore the issue, this study proposes two major dimensions, customer participation and organization resource utilization, which should be considered in building a utilization strategy for twitter in organizations. We then develop four different combinations along with these dimensions-follow, mention, retweet, and review types. Based on case studies of 27 organizations that use twitter, we evaluate the degrees of customer participation, resource utilization, and customer satisfaction, and examine matching or mismatching of the adoption purpose of twitter and its actual utilization. The study results reveal that organizations in the matching group show higher customer satisfaction that those in the mismatching group. This study sheds new light on twitter research by developing a new conceptual framework and using a case study approach to explore the relationship between the utilization strategy of twitter and customer satisfaction.