میزان توانایی رسانه های اجتماعی در بازاریابی B2B Social media capability in B2B marketing: toward a definition and a research model

1. Introduction Social media research in the business-to-business (B2B) context has enjoyed relatively less attention compared to business-to-consumer social media research (Aral et al., 2013; Kane et al., 2014). Although social media has been increasingly adopted in some industrial marketing activities, academics argue that firms engaged in B2B marketing have not used social media to its full potential (Michaelidou et al., 2011; Karjaluoto et al., 2015), and firms continue to encounter problems in integrating social media technologies into their firm’s marketing efforts (Järvinen & Karjaluoto, 2015). Most of the time, this is due to the lack of a clear and systematic understanding of social media (Ngai et al., 2015). Research has indicated that, knowing how (i.e., how to integrate social media technology into firm’s operations and strategies) is more important than knowing what (i.e., what social media has been used for) (Nguyen et al., 2015). The aim of this paper is to explore how firms can develop an organizational capability that enables the stable and smooth alignment between social media and B2B marketing. Specifically, in this paper, we attempt to answer two research questions: • What is social media capability in a B2B marketing context? • How can social media capability be developed in firms engaged in B2B marketing? Through an interdisciplinary research lens, we conduct a thematic literature review on social media research in the B2B Marketing and Information Systems areas. Based on the review, we propose a definition and a maturity model of social media capability that specifically applies to B2B marketing. This paper has several implications. First, the social media capability definition and the social media capability maturity model developed in this paper provide a systematic approach to conceptualize the use of social media in B2B marketing. Second, the social media capability maturity model could be used by practitioners to assess and guide their B2B marketing practices. Third, our review identifies some research gaps in studies of social media in B2B marketing and indicates many directions for future research. The remainder of the paper is organized as follows. Section 2 explains our research methodology. Section 3 presents the literature review results and our findings regarding the two research questions. The theoretical and empirical implications of this paper are discussed in Section 4. Section 5 presents the conclusion.