Hwanho Choi and Bernard Burnes
Although social media proficiency and use are key business and marketing practices in today’s digital environment, research has failed to offer sufficient insights into what…
Abstract
Purpose
Although social media proficiency and use are key business and marketing practices in today’s digital environment, research has failed to offer sufficient insights into what drives small firms to use social media and how they vitalise co-creative social media environments with consumers. In response, the purpose of this paper is to examine how small firms utilise social media to interact and build bonds with consumers. These bonds become an important tool in the development of successful, profitable businesses and marketing practices in the digital age.
Design/methodology/approach
To examine how small firms use social media to engage with consumers and vice versa, the authors utilised a case-study approach and collected qualitative data by conducting semi-structured interviews.
Findings
The results showed that the small firms in this research seek to establish relationships and facilitate interactions with their core consumers in order to co-create value. In particular, the data demonstrate that producers engage in two distinctive practices: bonding (i.e. cultivating emotional ties with music fans) and spreading (i.e. encouraging expressive circulation by fans). Altogether, the findings indicate that the representative firms in this research use social media to develop synergistic relationships with consumers and to tap into the collective energy of consumers in their business environments.
Originality/value
The authors show that small companies use social media to establish relationships and interact with fans in order to co-create value and vitalise collective consumption, engagement, and participation. The case blurs the traditional distinction between production and consumption and suggests that the value of goods is a social creation, not merely a manufactured product.
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Keywords
Bernard Burnes and Hwanho Choi
This article aims to explore the arguments that citizens of future cities will increasingly live in virtual communities as well as bricks and mortar ones, and that some previously…
Abstract
Purpose
This article aims to explore the arguments that citizens of future cities will increasingly live in virtual communities as well as bricks and mortar ones, and that some previously physical supply chains will become virtual networks or communities. In examining these arguments, the article investigates the development of the independent music community in Seoul, South Korea.
Design/methodology/approach
The research is based on a qualitative case study of music fans and independent record labels in Seoul.
Findings
The article shows that independent music fans in Seoul have built a self-organising, fan-dominated, value co-creating community, which has replaced the old, music label-dominated, hierarchical supply chain. The community arose from the passion of fans and their engagement with social media, rather the intentions of city planners and supply-chain architects.
Originality/value
The article shows that Seoul may be an exemplar of how future cities can and will develop, particularly in terms of the ability of people to use social media to develop and run their own virtual spaces and communities, which are tailored to the way they want to live their lives.