INCREASING THE VALUE OF COMMUNITIES

THROUGH

EMPLOYEE PARTICIPATION

Michael Ling

Abstract

Organizations leverage online communities to generate business value today. Online communities

let organizations connect and engage with customers, suppliers, partners, governments and other

stakeholders. They are being used as platforms for co-creation, collaboration, customer support and

knowledge sharing – the success of these usages depends heavily on employee participation.

On the other hand, organizations are concerned with their social media risk exposure by developing

social media policies to mitigate the risks. If employees perceived those social media policies as difficult to

understand or comply, they would hesitate to participate in the online communities and, hence, the social

media initiatives of the organizations would suffer. So, how should an organization go about addressing this

double edged problem?

Drawing from the literature in CoPs (Lave & Wenger, 1991) and social media governance (Fink &

Zerfass, 2010; Macnamara & Zerfass, 2012), a theoretical model was proposed to guide the research. The

respondents were drawn from the employees and management of the case organization in order to gain an

integrated perspective. Data were collected from semi-structured open-ended interviews with the

respondents and relevant artefacts. Data analysis included open coding and role-ordered matrices, assisted

with the use of NVivo CAQDAS software. Three of the key themes emerged from the research are:

Number 1

The dual aspects of a social media strategy: mitigation of social media risks and building

community practice.

Number 2

Management’s influence is significant to community governance and affects the openness of the

online community.

Number 3

Social media policies alone may not be an effective way of communication to employees.

The research concluded with a total of five bilateral and four unilateral themes, which provides

insights for the public relations, marketing and communication professionals to develop effective social

media strategy and governance for online communities.