Social Media and Entrepreneurship: Describing Strategies and Suggesting Practices

The purpose of this project is to study and describe how entrepreneurs utilize social media as a strategy for gaining support and building momentum for their enterprises.

Background and Problem Statement

Social media is being heralded as the biggest shift in the way people interact and communicate since the Industrial Revolution (Qualman 2009), and although its cumulative effects are still unknown, it is clear that social media is significantly changing how people work together. A fusion of technology and social behavior, social media emphasizes community, democracy, participation, conversation, and authenticity. Social media encourages content creation through writing and media production, and social media is subtly changing the way people read, process information, and think. While print technology facilitates forms of concentrated, sustained attention and thought, social media encourages distributed and plastic thinking. This shift is more than merely a change in the way we read and communicate; it marks a change in nearly every aspect of human affairs (Shiffman, 2009).

Entrepreneurship is one of the most significant realms impacted by the social media revolution and the egalitarian ethos it espouses. In a recent issue of Wired Magazine, for example, Charles C. Mann argues that corporate giants, like the “Big Three” automakers in the United States, simply cannot compete against more nimble “industry ecosystems” that weave together small firms through cloud computing and electronic partnerships (Mann 2009). Indeed, even the smallest upstart firms now recognize that they can compete globally and order from a global supply chain. This industry ecosystem model positions entrepreneurs in a powerful position to begin developing products, services and technologies that can contribute a small, niche component to a larger ecosystem and perhaps ultimately overturn the hegemony of the large corporate giants.

Perhaps the most significant thing, however, about the social media revolution is the way it connects people and builds “tribes” (Godin 2008) around ideas or concepts. As a practice, entrepreneurship fundamentally relies on connecting like-minded people to launch and build an enterprise. Historically, entrepreneurs engage in traditional networking—face-to-face meetings, networking conventions, personal relationships—to build interest in their ideas. Yet social media technologies give entrepreneurs greater audience reach at lower cost and lower risk than traditional media. Through free tools like blog-hosting services, video-sharing websites, and social networking communities, every entrepreneur has an opportunity to create their own messages and, paradoxically, share those messages broadly by targeting countless narrow, specific audiences as they build a core group of investors, customers and collaborators. (Goetz & Barger, 2008). In other words, social media enables entrepreneurs access to a global audience at the same time that it enables entrepreneurs to pinpoint individual collaborators.

In short, social media marks a change in the way entrepreneurs undertake their activities and forces us to question the value of traditional entrepreneurial activity in the new, egalitarian and participatory economy. Indeed, collaborative projects such as Wikipedia demonstrate that a previously unexploited collective intelligence can be tapped when the right conditions are established and maintained (Bull, et. al, 2008). As Burgess, Foth, & Klaebe (2006) argue, entrepreneurs in the new economy are rushing to connect with this human talent and creativity that lives within social networks.

However, in spite of the opportunity that social media presents for entrepreneurs, very few scholars have formally studied the intersection of social media and entrepreneurship. Certainly many writers have expressed their opinions in blogs and trade journals, but these sources often present opinions and practices based on personal experience rather than generalizeable research. Of the research that does address entrepreneurship and social media, only Greve (2003) formally addresses the relationship of social media and entrepreneurship practice, and found that social networks grow and contract at different times in the process of building an enterprise, with the beginning phases of an enterprise demonstrating the largest network. Social media utilities such as Facebook or MySpace are also mentioned quite often in entrepreneurship guides, most frequently as an example of a technology that meets the needs of particular audiences (Kuratko 2008), or as examples of ways to manage the growth of a new media start up (Loebbecke and Huyskens 2008). Finally, some researchers who have investigated entrepreneurship curricula argue that discussion of social media should be included in entrepreneurship programs, yet these authors don’t provide details on ways to use social media in entrepreneurship (Millman 2009).

This sampling of literature reveals a significant gap in the research on social media and entrepreneurship. Specifically the literature to date doesn’t examine how entrepreneurs engage with and utilize social media as an avenue for building momentum for their new ventures.

The purpose of this project, then, is to study and describe how entrepreneurs utilize social media as a strategy for gaining support and building momentum for their enterprises.

Methods

This year-long study will be a “mixed methods qualitative study” that consists of three distinct yet complementary parts:

1. An Inventory of different possibilities and expectations of social media

2. Three detailed case studies of entrepreneurs just beginning their new ventures

3. An “auto-ethnography” of my own venture development.

The Inventory This descriptive portion of the study will be both observational and interview-based. First, I will document the various social media technologies available for entrepreneurial activities, for example blogging, (e.g. www.gobignetwork.com/wil), microblogging (e.g. Twitter), social networking (e.g. Facebook) and social bookmarking (e.g. www.delicious.com). This inventory will provide a baseline typology for the range of activities and resources available for entrepreneurial activities. While this resource might change as soon as it’s collected, it will provide, nonetheless, an understanding of the way these social media are used and to what degree.

The second phase of the inventory will compare the results of the observational study to interviews with social media professionals and a sample of entrepreneurs. Specifically, I’ll interview three recognized experts in using social media, such as Johan Ronnestam (www.ronnestam.com), Olivier Blanchard (http://thebrandbuilder.wordpress.com/) , Tamar Weinberg (www.techipedia.com) andthose interviews will be read against the observed practices to validate the degree to which social media marketing experts recommend different utilities to their clients. These data will then be read against interviews with 20 entrepreneurs identified through my own connections with entrepreneurship advisory group SCORE (www.score.org), through the Spiro Institute for Entrepreneurial Leadership (http://business.clemson.edu/Spiro/abouSpiro.htm), and through a network of my own individual contacts in the Southeastern United States. These interviews will uncover how the observed practices and the expert-recommended practices are utilized in reality by actual entrepreneurs.

Combined, this inventory will suggest and validate a range of practices used by entrepreneurs, establishing a baseline for the way that social media are used and enabling me to build a preliminary theory of social media for entrepreneurship to be tested in the case studies and auto-ethnography.

Three Detailed Case Studies Drawing on the preliminary theory derived in the inventory stage, this research component will follow three entrepreneurs as they utilize social media. Three entrepreneurs from different sectors who are at the early stages of building an enterprise will be selected to represent three possible entrepreneurial contexts: 1) a small for-profit start up; 2) a non-profit start up; 3) an established organization launching a new venture. The case studies will be conducted following methods suggested by Yin (2003) for “multiple case design” and will last approximately 9 months to allow for the social media strategy to evolve. According to Yin, case studies are the preferred research strategy when the project concerns contemporary phenomena within a real-life focus and the study will follow the design shown below (p. 50): 

Autoethnography Autoethnography is a relatively new development in qualitative research and used most frequently in education and anthropology to investigate the author’s own sense of relationships and practices. According to Chang (2008) one primary purpose of autoethnography is for the author to explore his own relationships to larger cultural practices—social media and entrepreneurship in this case—and to expand on themes that traditional academic research might overlook such as muddy political or interpersonal complications related to the issue under investigation. This particular autoethnography will trace my own use of social media for beginning my own enterprise related to a trademarked process called “STREAMTools” developed by myself and a collaborator, Alex Mamishev. We developed STREAMTools in response to specific needs for writers working in large research teams who need a process for streamlining their collaborative authorship of large documents. The process will be unveiled in a book Writing for Research Teams: The STREAMTools Handbook, in May 2010, and is the center of a larger consulting and training organization that Alex and I have begun to build around the process. The autoethnography component of this study will include my own journals about the process, as well as reflections on my relationships to larger cultural themes such as the egalitarian nature of social media. Much like the case studies, this autoethnography will test the theory of utilizing social media and entrepreneurship, placing the theory into a highly specific context of use that foregrounds the real actions and reflections of a unique individual.

Combined, the three methods will present three distinct, yet complementary, lenses on the role of social media in entrepreneurship ranging from the generalizable and abstract to the highly specific and personal. Since entrepreneurship as a phenomenon is described in both ways—as a general practice and as an individual undertaking—the research methods reproduce the range of concerns for entrepreneurship.

Works Cited

Bull, G., Thompson, A., Searson, M., Garofalo, J., Park, J., Young, C., & Lee, J. (2008). “Connecting informal and formal learning experiences in the age of participatory media” Contemporary Issues in Technology and Teacher Education. 8(2). 100-107.

Burgess, J. E., Foth, M., & Klaebe, H. G. (2006). “Everyday creativity as civic engagement: A cultural citizenship view of new media.” Communications Policy & Research Forum, Sydney, Australia. Available online: http://www.networkinsight.org/events/cprf_2006.html

Chang, H. (2008). Autoethnography as Method. Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press.

Chin, R. (2003). Case Study Research: Design and Methods. 3^rd Edition. London: Sage Publications.

Goetz, J., & Barger, C. (2008). “Harnessing the media revolution to engage the youth market.” Journal of Integrated Marketing Communications. 26-32.

Greve, A and Salaff J.W. (2003). “Social networks and entrepreneurship.” Entrepreneurship Theory and Practice. 28:1.

Godin, S. (2008). Tribes: We Need You to Lead Us. London: Penguin.

Kuratko, D. (2008). Entrepreneurship: Theory, Process, Practice. 8^th Edition. Mason, Ohio: South-Western Cengage Learning.

Loebbecke, C. & Huyskens, C. (2008). “Virtual Community Ventures: Success Drivers in the Case of Online Video Sharing.” Proceedings of the Fourteenth Americas Conference on Information Systems. Toronto, Canada, August 2008.

Mann, C. (2009). “Beyond Detroit”. Wired. 17:6. pp. 101-107

Millman, C., Wong, W., Li, Z., and Matlay, H. (2009) “Educating students for e-entrepreneurship in the UK, the USA and China.” Industry and Higher Education, 23.3. pp. 243-25.

Qualman, E. (2009). Socialnomics: How Social Media Transforms the Way We Live and Do Business. NY: Wiley.

Shiffman, D. (2008). The Age of Engage: Reinventing Marketing for Today's Connected, Collaborative, and Hyperinteractive Culture. Ladera Ranch, CA: Hunt Street Press.