How and why Organisations Use Social Media: Five Use Types and their Relation to Absorptive Capacity
基于20家组织的访谈，识别出五种社交媒体使用类型（广播、对话、协作、知识管理和社交），并分析它们与组织吸收能力的关系，发现对话等类型有助于提升绩效，而社交类型则不然。
In this paper, we examine the relation between social media use and the absorptive capacity of organisations. Over the past 10 years, many organisations have systematically adopted social media. Trade press and consulting companies often claim that the systematic use of social media increases the performance of organisations. However, such claims are typically neither empirically grounded nor theoretically examined. In this paper, based on key informant interviews at 20 organisations, we examine these claims empirically and theoretically. Firstly, we examine the ways in which social media are used by organisations. We identify five different social media use types that support different organisational purposes (broadcast, dialogue, collaboration, knowledge management and sociability). Secondly, we analyse how these five social media use types relate to organisations' absorptive capacity. We find that particular social media use types (e.g., dialogue) support organisations' absorptive capacity and, ultimately, their performance although others (e.g., sociability) do not.