A systematic mapping study on using social media for business process improvement
Introduction
Internet access has become easier in recent years due to improvements in the infrastructure of telecommunications. The Internet, previously used only for military purposes, grew in its technical capabilities and it penetrated into different territories once it was released to the general public (Wachter, Gupta, & Quaddus, 2000).
As this developed and spread, innumerable applications, such as blogs, sharing platforms and social media were developed (O'Reilly, 2007). Thus, according to Kaufman (2012), the development of social media is perhaps one of the greatest events in recent years, as it represents a new means of organization in contemporary society. Fialho and Lütz (2011) emphasize that these kinds of networks are becoming increasingly widespread and play a highly important role among the options for communication and information on the Internet.
Meanwhile, Cross and Thomas (2009) and Kirkpatrick (2012) report that users are creating new ways to use social media, affecting both personal relationships as well as relationships with businesses and governments. This is the case of social media that has gained an important place over the years, as, for example, Facebook®, LinkedIn®, and Twitter®, which permit organizations to have their own pages and applications on the social network itself. As the popularity of social media has grown, many studies have been mounted about its potential for disseminating information, whether information of public interest, advertisements or even rumors. However, apparently very little has been researched about the information generated by social media users for the improvement of processes within organizations.
This article fits in at this point. Exploiting the theme of user-generated content in social media, we conducted a systematic mapping study, aiming to point out the possible research opportunities and research trends. Specifically, we conducted research on how organizations have been using content generated by social media users to improve their processes.
This question becomes particularly important due to advances in web 2.0 that promoted greater interaction between people and organizations (Pacheco et al., 2010, Rowe, 2015). With the possibility of two-way communication, there have been numerous attempts to pay attention to clients who wish to give some sort of feedback to companies or even make suggestions for new products (Andriole, 2010, Baumer et al., 2011, Nascimento et al., 2014).
The remainder of this paper is organized as follows. The second section explains what a systematic mapping study is. The third deals with the procedures adopted in this study. The fourth and fifth present quantitative and qualitative analysis of the articles selected. Finally, the sixth presents final remarks on the study.
Section snippets
Systematic mapping studies
The evidence-based paradigm has had considerable success in terms of influencing research and practice in clinical medicine. In turn, the ideas and the practices involved have been adopted and adapted by many other disciplines that depend upon empirical data for purposes such as building theories and obtaining an understanding of practice, in education, psychology and many of the health-related and social sciences (Kitchenham, Budgen, & Pearl Brereton, 2011).
In this paradigm, the systematic
The mapping process
This research aimed to analyze studies in social media that contribute to the improvement of business processes by executing a systematic mapping study. According to Kitchenham et al. (2011), this type of study examines a broader topic and classifies the literature in that specific domain, using high level research questions.
A fundamental characteristic of this type of research is that its execution is based on a protocol, as reported by Budgen, Turner, Brereton, and Kitchenham (2008).
Quantitative analysis
The survey, which selected articles published up to 2015, initially found 1912 articles from scientific peer-evaluated journals. Of these, as already mentioned, only 177 (9.3%) were selected after the first filtering and 28 (15.8% articles from the previous stage and 1.5% of all items indicated by the database) after the second step. The third step used all the 28 articles after confirming the inclusion criteria in each study, as can be seen in Table 2.
Twenty-four journals in the areas of
Qualitative analysis
When starting the research on the topic, we noticed that there were many articles dealing with social media and organizations in some way, given that 1912 articles were found in the first phase of the search. There were, however, few articles with the approach that is of interest to this study.
Among the items observed in the first phase of the search, there was a lack of studies addressing the topic of user-generated content in social media to improve processes of organizations. It is also
Conclusion
The purpose of this article was to see how studies on social media have been viewed as mechanisms to improve business processes.
From the initial research, we noted that the theme of social media associated to processes and management has been widely studied, given a return of 1912 articles at the beginning. Most of these studies, however, have been concerned only with information dissemination, given the vast potential for sharing.
Studies focused on obtaining information from social media were
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