Consultant strategies and Technological affordances: Managing organisational social media

Organisations increasingly seek to explore the new opportunities that social media offers in terms of engaging with customers, users, and partners. So far, academic research on organisational practice of social media is sporadic and corporate actors are thus left without level-headed advice as to how to best implement and use social media technologies. In this paper, we examine what sort of advice management consultants offer organisations looking to engage in social media. We use four affordances of social media – visibility, persistence, editability, and association – to analytically explore the fit between social media as a technology and the strategies offered by consultancy firms. We also look attitudes towards social media and information management, which contributes to practitioners’ understanding of the intrinsic characteristics of social media. Our research concludes that affordances of the technology clashes with a centralised top-down approach to information management that dominates in consultants’ strategy documents.