The Key to Social Media Implementation: Bridging Customer Relationship Management to Social Media

Perhaps, one of the most recent IT-based solutions nowadays is social media solution. Many organizations have created their own Facebook and Twitter pages, and employ social media tools to monitor their standing in the social networks. However, not all of them have been successful in employing these social solutions. As a matter of fact, we attempted to investigate the most important factors in implementation of IT-based solutions (with an emphasis on customer relationship management) in the social media context. We interviewed 65 IT professionals from various organizations and employed exploratory factor analysis to find the similarities and distinctions between social media solution implementation and other IT-based solutions implementation. Although our results revealed some similarities, the social part of these new solutions imposed a specific emphasis to customer engagement. Finally, we proposed a framework for implementation of social media solutions.