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The main purpose of this paper is to explore the main characteristics of corporate social media guidelines (SMG) and determine whether companies communicate these guidelines effectively to employees.

An analysis of corporate SMG is conducted using the Competing Values Framework (CVF) formerly used to assess business and ethical codes. The sample is comprised of 20 multinational companies that publish their SMG online.

The results indicate the majority of the guidelines received average scores across the CVF framework, which implies the guidelines barely manage to stimulate change, direct action, provide facts or emphasize the importance of building trust.

A possible limitation of the research could be the issue of interpretability of the features of the framework. Hence, the quality of the research depends on the quality of the training raters receive prior to the guideline rating process. Additionally, the researchers were limited with the guideline availability and could analyze only the guidelines available online. This analysis can be broadened by identifying factors that may influence the characteristics of the guidelines (e.g. corporate culture or industry).

Managers can use this framework to analyze their companies’ guidelines to reveal the gaps, point to opportunities for improvement or take the findings into account when developing new guidelines.

The first paper that analyzes corporate SMG and their respective characteristics.

Online communication technologies have profoundly affected consumption and buying behaviours, and put pressure on businesses to find ways of dealing with these developments. Businesses are increasingly experimenting with new approaches and tools to keep up, and netnography – ethnography applied to the web – has become popular. However, exploiting the potential of netnography requires companies to cope with new problems and acquire new capabilities. The purpose of this paper is to examine the organizational and managerial implications of using the netnographic approach in market research.

After a literature review on netnography in marketing research, the authors present a case study of best practice of netnography for market research: the research project of Dash-Procter & Gamble on Motherhood Support.

The authors found four issues as critical for exploiting the potential of netnography as a tool of market research: first, immersive involvement; second, mediated participation; third, the use of multiple techniques and distributed specialized capabilities; and fourth, the need for orchestrating the emergent network organization of the project. The quality of the research outcomes is related to the resources available and the integration of different roles and competences in the project.

Since netnographic studies involve collaborative research, further studies of experiences in organizing netnography projects are needed. These studies are bound to yield valuable insights.

Exploiting the potential of netnography implies experimenting with novel approaches and solutions in marketing research practices to orient management decisions and calls for developing skills to orchestrate research project networks.

The value of this work lies in zooming in on the methodological principles of netnography and zooming out on the networking managerial processes that make it possible to implement the networking required to exploit the potential of netnography.