Technology Use of Social Media within Customer Relationship Management: An Organizational Perspective

This paper presents a formative measurement model for Social CRM technology use from an organizational perspective. The current literature measures the usage of Social Media technologies (e.g., Facebook) and single Social CRM features (e.g., information generation) with reflective indicators, but does not provide a structured approach, which would generate deeper insights into this research field (i.e., formative indicators). To address this gap, the article develops and evaluates formative indicators and corresponding constructs of Social CRM technology use, following the procedure of Moore and Benbasat (1991). To evaluate the impact of single indicators on their corresponding constructs, data is analyzed through confirmatory factor analysis with a survey sample of 122 marketing, communication and IT decision makers. The results show that four constructs measure the use of Social CRM technology (Processing, Communication, IS Integration, and Management), which constitutes the formative measurement model. The construct Processing highlights a second-order construct, including Monitoring and Capturing, Analysis, and Exploitation as first-order constructs. Generally, the developed formative indicators and corresponding constructs generate deeper insights through a control system within a company, so as to increase the efficiency and effectiveness of their marketing, communication as well as IT efforts.