Evaluating readiness of organizations to adopt social media for competitive advantage

To stay competitive, organizations are strategizing, looking for newer and better ways of satisfying the needs of their customers. One way in which they do this is by adopting and using Information Technology. Information Technology is always evolving and as a result newer tools and concepts continually spring up promising to provide value to organizations. Social media is one of these technologies and there has been extensive coverage of its usefulness in the literature. However, despite the success stories shared, many organizations still fail to reap its benefits after they adopt it. One of the reasons for this is that some organizations might just be unprepared for social media. This paper looks into how organizations can assess their readiness to adopt social media by looking at the factors organizations need to consider prior to adopting social media. Based on these factors a framework was developed to assess the readiness of organizations to adopt social media for competitive advantage. The framework was validated using case studies and following that it was refined to incorporate the practitioners´ views.