Active Social Media Management: The Case of Health Care
Name
Tucker_Active social.pdf
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749.49 KB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
716c25b9f55ea5646c96a8cb85683781
Author(s)
Miller, Amalia R.
Tucker, Catherine Elizabeth
Date Issued
March 2013
Journal
Information Systems Research
Publisher
Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS)
Citation
Miller, Amalia R., and Catherine Tucker. “Active Social Media Management: The Case of Health Care.” Information Systems Research 24, no. 1 (March 2013): 52–70.
Version
Author's final manuscript
Abstract
Given the demand for authentic personal interactions over social media, it is unclear how much firms should actively manage their social media presence. We study this question empirically in a health care setting. We show that active social media management drives more user-generated content. However, we find that this is due to an incremental increase in user postings from an organization's employees rather than from its clients. This result holds when we explore exogenous variation in social media policies, employees, and clients that are explained by medical marketing laws, medical malpractice laws, and distortions in Medicare incentives. Further examination suggests that content being generated mainly by employees can be avoided if a firm's postings are entirely client focused. However, most firm postings seem not to be specifically targeted to clients' interests, instead highlighting more general observations or achievements of the firm itself. We show that untargeted postings like these provoke activity by employees rather than clients. This may not be a bad thing because employee-generated content may help with employee motivation, recruitment, or retention, but it does suggest that social media should not be funded or managed exclusively as a marketing function of the firm.
MIT Department
Sloan School of Management
Terms of Use
Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike
Persistent DSpace Link
DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1287/isre.1120.0466
