Strategy Reformation? Materialization of Social Media in Telecom Industry
The pervasive use of social media is influencing change within organization. This paper uses sociomaterial lens with agential view to understand how social media is reforming strategy in Telecom organization through exploring changes brought by social med
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Abstract. The pervasive use of social media is influencing change within organization. This paper uses sociomaterial lens with agential view to understand how social media is reforming strategy in Telecom organization through exploring changes brought by social media to organization, evaluating the changes with selection of strategic theories as well as providing insight on adoption of social media by telecom organizations. Following an interpretivist philosophy with exploratory purpose the study uses case study methodology employing secondary data and observation to explain how social media practices are shaping strategy at Vodacom. Social media is reforming strategy within telecom industry by exerting influence on organizational process for instance product development and marketing strategy. Keywords: Social media
Strategy Sociomateriality
1 Introduction There are significant changes within organizations as result of widespread use of social media application such as Facebook, Twitter, WhatsApp, Instagram, Snapchat, YouTube and Viber. For instance, social media has influenced marketing strategy of organizations (Gallaugher and Ransbotham 2010; Culnan et al. 2010), where the wide use of these social media applications has had implications on how organizations and customers interact with one another (Culnan et al. 2010). (Dabner 2012) defines social media as Internet and mobile-based applications that integrate technology, telecommunication and social interaction to facilitate creation and dissemination of words, videos images and audio. According to Mangold and Faulds (2009, p. 358), “the 21st century is witnessing an explosion of Internet-based messages transmitted through these media”. Despite the fact that it is becoming a major factor for consideration for both businesses and consumers, the impact of social media for organizations is not yet clearly identified. Thus, it is difficult to determine the extent to which the transformation-taking place in organizations results from social media (Treem and Leonardi 2012). For the purpose of this study, focus of this paper is on the telecommunications sector in Tanzania with the following objectives:
© IFIP International Federation for Information Processing 2016 Published by Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2016. All Rights Reserved Y.K. Dwivedi et al. (Eds.): I3E 2016, LNCS 9844, pp. 31–41, 2016. DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-45234-0_3
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• To Investigate what changes social media brings into an organization • To evaluate the selection of a theory that will provide a specific research angle to study social media within the Tanzanian telecommunications sector • To understand social media adoption in Tanzania
2 Literature Review 2.1
Sociomateriality
Sociomateriality, which is a new way of investigating and theorizing information system (IS) phenomena within organization and society at large, is appealing to Information System (IS) scholars. It has stirred an interesting and enriched discussion on how it could be used to study IS phenome
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