Social Media: A Technology that needs no Support from It…Yet

Abstract

Research indicates that social media applications, such as Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn are rapidly being adopted by many organizations. However, little is known about the different resources and capabilities that organizations deploy internally to support social media initiatives, nor of the role that organizational IT departments and IT professionals may play in the deployment. We examine the content of 200 social media job ads collected from Indeed.com to gain understanding of organizational use of social media and how organizations are developing their social media initiatives. Our findings indicate that organizations are planning to deploy significant resources and are developing new internal processes to support social media initiatives. In addition, gaining sustainable benefit from these initiatives may require considerable investment in complementary resources. Our data also indicate that IT departments have little involvement in these initiatives.