Last week I wrote about how Facebook is becoming the innovation platform. Singaraju et al. (2016) point out that social media platforms should not only be viewed as a context in the  communication, value co-creation or innovation between participants. A social media platform can be seen as an actor as well, when it is able to generate higher order information through specific algorithms.

Although I very much believe that social media platforms can be such an actor in both business-to-business (B2B)and business-to-consumer (B2C) contexts, it requires that social media should be a part of the communication strategy between firms and customers in the first place. Today not in all industries this is the case yet. In my observation, communication between firm and customer  via social media are still in the early stage in most industries. Value creation through social media platforms shall therefore remain limited until the moment firms and customers start sharing information on a larger scale.

Norbert Bol

Literature

Singaraju, S. P., Nguyen, Q. A., Niininen, O., & Sullivan-Mort, G. (2016). Social media and value co-creation in multi-stakeholder systems: A resource integration approach. Industrial Marketing Management.

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