Management

Practical challenges to manage social media marketing have attracted scholars to investigate the subject further and develop different academic models and frameworks to help guide organizations. As social media can be an important tool for firms to continuously listen, digest information, and respond appropriately to their target audience, management strategies and challenges are important to consider (Peters et al. 2013). One social media framework designed for management use was created under the overarching framework of Stimulus, Organism, and Response paradigm (SOR) and a continuous feedback loop (Peters et al. 2013). The four interconnected elements of the framework proposed by Peters et al. (2013) for social media management include motives, content, network structure, and social roles and interactions. The framework also focuses on marketing inputs and marketing outputs (Peters et al. 2013).

Another study conducted by Taylor and Murphy (2004) investigated more broadly the management of e-business tools (such as social media) in multiple function areas of the firm and what different stages of technology adoption could look like in areas such as logistics, finance, procurement, and marketing. Although some of the challenges of resources and finances were commonly cited, they also reiterated the importance of leadership in implementing tools like social media and their role in overcoming some of the challenges that firms will face in developing their social media efforts (Taylor & Murphy 2004).

The complexities and challenges faced by managers were also acknowledged by Parsons and Lepkowska-White (2018), and they developed a framework to outline the actions needed at each stage of social media strategy development. They considered social media as an enabler for managers and firms in their overall operations to facilitate engagement and interactions online with their customers (Parsons and Lepkowska-White 2018). How firms considered their strategic focus shaped the four actions within the framework: messaging/projecting,

28 monitoring, assessing, and responding (Parsons and Lepkowska-White 2018). Another framework was suggested by McCann and Barlow (2015) that the three stages of social media marketing management consist of planning, implementation, and evaluation. The work of Keegan and Rowley (2017) also includes these three activities (planning, implementation, and evaluation) in their framework, but indirectly.

Another perspective of management functions related to customer engagement objectives was investigated in a study by Żyminkowska (2019). Żyminkowska’s (2019) model positioned customer engagement as an object of managerial decisions and identified that firms can choose to execute marketing tasks that are related to the value delivery process or execute marketing tasks related to management of the network Firms can categorize their existing social media marketing tasks with this model and understand where the gaps lie between their engagement objectives and their marketing activities to improve their strategy management.

Żyminkowska’s (2019) dual model of customer engagement and the categories of each are shown in Figure 5.

Sensing (analyzing)

Resourcing (planning)

Realizing (implementation)

Learning (control)

Customers Communication

Customer Complaints

Choosing the Value Providing the Value Communicating the Value

Marketing Management Functions

Marketing as Value Delivery Process

Figure 5: Dual model of customer engagement forms in marketing management (Adapted from Żyminkowska 2019)

29 Several marketing scholars have also investigated some of the unique challenges among social media marketing management in SMEs (Taylor & Murphy 2004; Brink 2017; Ayele &

Barabadi 2018). Brink’s (2017) study found that the biggest challenge in B2B social media application was the difficulty “to overcome the gap between acknowledging the usefulness of social media and its actual limited application.” The two antecedents discovered through interviews with SME managers was to create an open collaborative business model for innovation, and secondly to create ownership and responsibility with central and distributed leadership (Brink 2017). Some managers interviewed in the study tried to overcome the “gap”

between acknowledgement and implementation by outsourcing social media marketing activities (Brink 2017). However, in the B2B context, a high knowledge of local processes and understanding of the market was required, and communication to an external team member often created even more difficulties for the team (Brink 2017). Choi and Thoeni (2016) also interviewed social media managers during their study to contribute to engagement literature from the organizational process perspective. They identified four steps under the category of organizational processes and subsequent organizational activities under each one, and their framework is shown in Figure 6 (Choi & Thoeni 2016). Research findings showed that user to user engagement was a key contributor to the firm’s goals in their social media strategy, and it also led to improved services and offerings when firms utilized social media as a way to observe and learn from consumers (Choi & Thoeni 2016).

• Top Management Vision

Figure 6: Framework for organizational processes and activities (Adapted from Choi & Theoni 2016)

Another one of the big challenges that firms face is the need to understand social media channels and their strategy first, before they can manage the channels effectively (Peters et al.

2013). In a study on marketing management challenges among Nordic SMEs in the metal industry, Ayele and Barabadi’s (2018) found that more than half of the organizations studied did not have a proper understanding of the fundamentals of marketing management goals nor

30 a clearly defined strategy. Three other marketing management challenges discovered in this context include a struggle with resources (time, money, or talent), difficulty reaching clients effectively (particularly Swedish and Finnish SMEs), and low assistance from government and local municipalities regarding aspects of marketing management (Ayele & Barabadi 2018).

Additional research into specific marketing management challenges in the Nordic region for other organization types could also be beneficial to identify more opportunities for effective social media strategy development and management.