Co-creating Value from Social Media: A Framework

Abstract

Co-created value occurs when both the customer and provider benefit simultaneously from an interaction. To deliver on these opportunities, marketing has become a means by which organizations across the product-service spectrum directly interact with customers outside of traditional value-creating activities. Via social media, organizations influence customers while supporting value co-creation for the brand and users simultaneously. While this offers a wide range of opportunities to interact with customers, continued saturation of social networks has magnified the importance of engaging in organic dialogue. To that end, the aim of this article is to establish a framework usable across industries, platforms and content types. The social media value creation framework includes six vertical categories, including respond, transact, educate, awareness, stimulate and entertain. Definitions and examples of each vertical, along with theoretical and practical applications, are included.

Keywords

Customer value co-creation social media marketing content classification customer engagement value creation

Introduction

The process of value creation and consumption, for both providers and customers, has changed significantly. In traditional, product-centric views, value is derived via exchange of goods and/or services but in contemporary theory and practice, value has become an interactive exchange where both the customer and provider serve a role in a process known as value co-creation (Edvardsson, Tronvoll, & Gruber, 2011). While service–industry value exchanges are inherently driven by the active relationship between customer and service provider (Gronroos, 2011), traditional manufacturing businesses, whose primary business is producing physical goods, have adopted components of value co-creation through servitization strategies (Lenka, Parida, & Wincent, 2017). These transferable tactics across the product–service spectrum largely relate to marketing and how digitization capabilities can facilitate interactions in an increasingly dynamic customer environment (Lerch & Gotsch, 2015).

Regardless of the underlying economic exchange principle, marketing now serves a key role in facilitating co-created value. While marketing was previously characterized as a decision-making activity directed at identifying and satisfying customers (Kotler, 1967), this command and control model is primarily effective when minimal options and communication channels exist. To utilize the growth of technology and ability to reach individual customers, marketing has evolved to a more interactive activity where firms gain value by engaging stakeholders (Kumar, 2015). Social media, a suite of technologies that allow customers to become active in their dialogue with brands (Vinerean, 2017), has pushed marketing to become a value co-creation facilitator as organizations drive communications with their customers (Ellegaard, Medlin, & Geersbro, 2014).

But even with the capabilities of social media marketing (SMM), effectively reaching and engaging customers has become progressively challenging (Leeflang, Verhoef, Dahlstrom, & Freundt, 2014). With an ever-increasing number of distribution channels and platforms, the importance of engaging in authentic dialogue has only grown (Henderson & Bowley, 2010). Originally, social media was developed for community development (Zwick & Bradshaw, 2016), specifically as a platform for discussion around a shared interest. But current SMM practices have moved away from community as providers use social media to perform advertising and marketing activities for less cost and effort (Kim & Ko, 2012), and in many cases, have become a source of irrelevant content ignored by users. By transforming social media into a surrogate for traditional marketing activities, interactions focus on sales optimization and brand awareness instead of co-creating user value through conversation and engagement.

With social media serving an ever-increasing role in facilitating customer–organization interactions, and greater efforts by social media platforms to identify and remove unsolicited messages (Jain, Sharma, & Agarwal, 2019), greater understanding of effective SMM content is needed. Therefore, the primary objective of this research is to leverage extant literature to identify a social media framework for content that co-creates value for customers and providers alike. This study shifts current research focus away from communication channels and transactional activities towards the underlying success for social media—identifying content that drives meaningful engagement, dialogue and idea exchange. The secondary objective is to provide theoretical and practical rationale for this framework through explanations of individual components and illustrative examples of how content enables co-creation of value. From a conceptual perspective, by establishing a classification system with a distinct set of categories or verticals, this study builds upon previous research to provide a deeper understanding of social media content. More importantly, it establishes a system universally applicable across disciplines or horizontals, to enable a deeper level of understanding of social media impacts and influences. From an applied perspective, results provide universal terminology in describing social media content and a functional classification that can be applied to organizations across geographical and discipline differences.

Value Co-creation and Marketing

Value is considered an elusive concept to define and conceptualize, especially as it relates to the actual process of value creation. Much of this difficulty lies in the complexity and divergent sources of value, including information, products, interactions, environment, ownership, information, interactions, environment and products and the types of value including self-oriented/other oriented, functional/instrumental, experiential/hedonic, symbolic/expressive and cost/sacrifice (Smith & Colgate, 2007). Typically, literature identifies value to imply some form of benefit against the backdrop of sacrifices, whereas the process of value co-creation happens when the user gains some benefit from the interaction with a provider (Gronroos, 2011). In this model, value is created for each party in two overlapping spheres, a provider sphere that includes supply-side activities in the transformation of resources into services and a second customer sphere where value-in-use emerges as a consumer uses the service. However, suppliers and customers are no longer on opposite sides of the equation, rather they interact to deliver value, both materially and symbolically (Galvagno & Dalli, 2014). This interaction changes traditional roles held within the marketplace where customers’ and suppliers’ ongoing interaction and collaboration establish co-created value.

For providers to capitalize on customer-organization interactions, marketing activities are increasingly being used. Marketing, with a central goal of presenting and creating value (Gronroos, 2017), provides unique opportunities for activities across the product–service spectrum to co-create value. As an enabler, marketing moves beyond the distributor of value created somewhere else into an activity where value is co-created with customers in the context of use (Bettencourt, Lusch, & Vargo, 2014). While value co-creation through marketing can occur in many different formats, the most important relates to the interactivity facilitated by marketing technologies. From an interactive marketing perspective, SMM is focused on the dialogue facilitated by and created around the offering and the development and effective sharing of content between providers and individuals (Dwivedi, Kapoor, & Chen, 2015; Filo, Lock, & Karg, 2015).

Social Media Influences

In their initial discussions on service-dominated logic, Lusch and Vargo (2006) identify that actors cannot necessarily create value for other actors but can make offers that have potential value. This position did not take into consideration the transformational power of social media and how it provides opportunities to co-create value (Dobele, Steel, & Cooper, 2015). According to Cova, Dalli and Zwick (2011), and their concept of working consumers, customers co-create value for each other through online interactions by acting as providers of shared information where other members gain knowledge and therefore value. With the emergence of the social customer who actively creates and propagates value-adding content (Berthon, Pitt, Plangger, & Shapiro, 2012), individuals are more than just one side of the value creation process—they are an integral part of co-creation process via the interaction and development of content.

Based upon the initial Gronroos–Voima Value model (Gronroos & Voima, 2013), and the further developed model presented by Gronroos (2017) visualizes the role of interaction as core to co-creation is further refined. In the provider sphere, where an organization operates without interaction, they are simply a facilitator of value or producer of resources to be used by customers. In the joint sphere, interaction between organizations and customers, both through SMM and other means, value is co-created. It is the customer sphere that presents challenging yet valuable opportunities. While the customer sphere is considered closed to providers, indicating a lack of direct influence, customers maintain active SMM dialogue between themselves while co-creating value for each other. While a provider can have limited influence on these conversations, their existence requires organizations to understand what users’ value and to monitor conversations to inform their SMM initiatives.

Figure 1.

Source: Gronroos (2017)

To understand the ever-evolving realm of SMM and the co-created value of this medium, authors have theorized various models of explanation. We know that users may only interact with a portion of fellow users, and this creates classifications based upon volume, velocity, and other data analytics (Li, Li, & Zhu, 2016). Kao, Yang, Wu, and Cheng (2016) established the IEPAR model, which details a process of interact-engage-propose-act-realize (IEPAR) to illustrate the co-creation process. The social media honeycomb model, which details the social media user experience and outlines social media functionality with identification, presence, relationships, reputation, groups, conversations, and sharing, outlines the fundamental structure to effectively engage customers (Kietzman, Hermkens, McCarthy, & Silvestre, 2011). Taxonomy structures have also been established by examining co-creators and their communicative actions facilitated by social media, including enhancement, validation, promotion, entertainment, personalization, negotiation, and socialization (Ge & Gretzel, 2018b).

Content and Value Co-creation

Marketing, as a core to co-creating value for customers across the product-service spectrum, is largely driven by content related to the perceived wants and needs of customers. People have access to the types of information they want, when they want it, and organizations must plan for effective messaging that allow customers to interact with it on their terms in order to create and sustain interest (Diaconu, Oancea, & Brinzea, 2016). As consumers increasingly access varied information sources, the value of SMM to cut through the clutter and reach customers has grown. This is driven by the need for relatable content that speaks to the needs and interests of customers, not solely that of the organization (Rahim & Clemens, 2012). The envisioned framework, as found in Table 1, is focussed on two core tenants: (1) that content co-creates value for both the source (provider) and recipients (customers), and (2) can be readily applied across industries, disciplines, and networks. In establishing this framework, an extensive search of relevant literature detailing SMM was conducted. Relevant information in marketing, business, economics, communications, sociology, psychology, and technology studies were examined. To help ensure a comprehensive search, initial terms related to SMM such as content, methods, value creation, customer/consumers, format, and trends were used. During this search, suggested articles from EbscoHost, ProQuest, Google Scholar, and the university’s library search tool were used to locate related studies. Table 2 provides a summary of depth and scope of literature referenced in creating this framework.

The respond vertical is fundamental to effective social media community development—it creates a dialogue when providers act on a customer’s question, concern, or inquiries. Via conversational acts, value is provided to a provider through customer relationship management and quality customer service to increase loyalty (Yen, 2016). In turn, customers derive value from direct engagement and increased perceived social capital through non-transactional relationships while having their concerns and opinions heard. For instance, respond content exists when a client expresses disappointment with a restaurant dining experience, posts this displeasure on the brand’s Facebook page, and management interacts in an attempt to rectify the problem via service recover. While complaints can be posted on review sites, such as Yelp, the principles of respond remain with the caveat that organizations must take additional steps in monitoring social media content to ensure these opportunities are captured. This strategy, regardless of post location, provides customer value when the provider addresses the customer service complaint while delivering organizational value through the public demonstration of customer responsiveness.

Table 1.

Social Media Value Co-creation Framework

Vertical	Explanation	Organizational Value	Customer Value
Respond	Engage in meaningful customer conversations to potential concerns, customers see organization’s care for stakeholder concerns	Demonstrates customer responsiveness; for example, individual and timely responses to user-initiated interactions or posts	Provides opportunities for customer voices to be heard; content that responds to customer’s questions and concerns across platforms
Transact	Encourage consumer actions that focus on revenue generation, soft sell features to encourage purchases	Increases revenue or moves customers through the purchase funnel; for example, product/service features, and deals, offers, and coupons	Opportunity for customer needs to be satisfied; distinct platforms for value proposition delivery and extraction
Educate	Provide relevant information on the organization products or services, inform stakeholders about pertinent options and features	Highlights benefits and capabilities to consumers; for example, product features, customer tips, and recognitions	Gain insights into the product or service provider; interactive opportunities to learn from another users/producers
Awareness	Sources of customer-relevant, non-brand information; intersection of community, organizational, and industry-related interests	Establishes credibility and drives influence through meaningful engagement; for example, community updates and stories and industry news	Discover content related to community/social interests aligned with the brand and industry; unique information and opportunities for users
Stimulate	Facilitate opportunities for customers to engage with or share unique content/stories; strengthens the brand-customer relationship	Generates user emotions or content through shared thoughts, experiences, and stories; for example, image sharing, questions, contests, customer–personnel interaction stories	Share information in a topic-specific community; stories to increase social capital within a group or gain value from the brand through content sharing
Entertain	Opportunity to display brand personality; humanizes and generates engagement through strategy supporting content	Delights, entertains and provides humorous interaction; for example, funny photos, animations or witty commentary	Prospect to be entertained by humorous content; identify and share viral content to increase peer social capital

Source: The author.

Table 2.

Social Media Literature Support

Vertical	Illustrative Summaries
Respond	• Customers now receive help on a real time basis and organizations have adjusted their customer service strategies accordingly (Gunarathne, Rui, & Seidmann, 2018) • Service failures, and their responses, have become public domain and poor responses in the public space impact potential customers (Melancon & Dalakas, 2018) • Expectations of responses to complaints have influenced online interactions with organizations and corresponding brand switching behaviours (Yen, 2016)
Transact	• Increased social media usage positively relates with increased shopping activities, based upon long-term relationships between stakeholders (Y. Zhang, Trusov, Stephen, & Jamal, 2017) • Social media activities influence perceived customer value and intention to purchase through social commerce tools (Lee, Kim, Chung, Ahn, & Lee, 2016) • SMM directly drives revenue by significantly impacting both immediate commerce activities and long-term sales relationships (Guesalaga, 2016)
Educate	• Brand-related content drives engagement and the type of content delivered increases involvement between providers and customers (Wien, 2018) • Delivering content to inform users on potential use in a highly desirable unobtrusive manner is readily available using social media (Du Plessis, 2017)
	• Social media provides appropriate channels, such as blogging, and unique social media content, such as infographics, to assist in educating customers (Habibi, Hamilton, Valos, & Callaghan, 2015)
Awareness	• Effectively increasing awareness of a consumer’s community increases purchase intentions by focussing on larger issues outside of commerce (Chen, Leu, & Su, 2016)• By focussing on topics central to customers as the focal point of SMM activities, providers can increase marketing success (Thackeray, Neiger, & Keller, 2012)• Increasing awareness of non-brand content, by leveraging community, can successfully build e-Word of Mouth for brands (Moran & Muzellec, 2017)
Stimulate	• Both cost effective and trackable, user-generated content elicits immediate and greater engagement than brand-generated content (Geurin & Burch, 2017)• Establishes an opportunity for providers to capitalize upon the customer empowerment movement within SMM to increase effectiveness (O’Brien, 2011)• Generated content significantly impacts the decision making process and corresponding purchase activities of SMM users (Llodra-Riera, Martinez-Ruiz, Jimenez-Zarco, & Izquierdo-Yusta, 2015)
Entertain	• Substantial differences exist between personal and successful provider use of SMM humour for engaging customers (Leibler & Chaney, 2014)• Substantial pitfalls exist for organizations that use humour incorrectly, as SMM activities influence business outcomes (Ali & Khattab, 2016)• Humour drives engagement as it relates to likes, comments, and posts, while driving overall effectiveness of SMM activities (Ge & Gretzel, 2018a)

Source: The author.

Transact content has become the preferred organizational foci as it is driven by, and increases, revenue generation (Zhang et al., 2017). Through soft or hard selling features, these posts encourage purchases and contribute to what is known as social commerce, where business occurs or is initiated through social media. These posts create provider value as they leverage developed relationships to increase revenue, both through the relationship and the potential access of each user’s extended network. Inversely, customers glean value as organizations often provide valuable incentives and users can potentially increase personal value within their own social network by sharing pertinent, value-creating information. For instance, if a boutique fashion store offers a percentage discount for being an active Twitter follower, such that the customer must share the initial offer, co-created value is quickly established for the customer (i.e., value proposition and social equity through sharing) and the provider (i.e., revenue and exposure).

Educate content provides information concerning the provider and its features, not in directly selling them but rather opportunities for customers to engage and learn about the products and services in an unobtrusive manner (Du Plessis, 2017). Through this content, providers create value by increasing awareness of what makes their offering unique or innovative features or uses. Customers gain value in the form of information to help in understanding potential purchase options, receiving unique insights into offerings, and product or service applications. For instance, a software company, through their YouTube channel, provides a series of mini tutorials about their award-winning features. The customer identifies value by receiving insights about the software’s products and services, and what makes it superior such as special recognitions or usability awards, and the provider receives value by encouraging additional purchases or sharing of a relevant how-to to demonstrate software superiority.

Awareness content supports the intersection of user interests and community activities by distributing customer-relevant, non-brand information. This unique content is driven by the need to support customers’ interests outside of the provider–customer relationship via information about the local community or society to increase overall SMM success (Moran & Muzellec, 2017). Unlike educate content, which is driven by the need to inform users about the provider or products and services, awareness content supports customers’ interests outside of the provider relationship. By providing insights into external organizations, such as when a pet store distributes information about a local Humane Society event to benefit stray dogs on Pinterest or they post information on the life-saving benefits of adopting pets, organizations gain value by providing additional opportunities for engagement, demonstrates interaction with the local community, and promotes events potentially aligned with growing their business or customer engagement. Customers gain value by learning of community activities, being associated with a producer that matches their own value system, and by potentially contributing to initiatives of personal interest.

Stimulate content is derived from the value of user-generated content and creating opportunities for customers to share their experiences in order to humanize organizational relationships or engage with planned sharing activities to elicit increased engagement (Geurin & Burch, 2017). By encouraging customers to share their brand-related thoughts, experiences, and stories, providers encourage active engagement that contributes to their online presence and boosts overall brand perceptions. Customer value is co-created from these activities by building social capital within the brand community, through expertise or unique stories, and further developing relationships via content sharing. An organization can create deeper emotional attachment with their customers when, for instance, a childcare facility posts updates of classroom activities on Facebook. These posts demonstrate features and fun activities to encourage parents to share posted content with their social networks while increasing overall exposure for the provider to potentially new customers.

The most ubiquitous of content, entertain, is an opportunity to display a brand’s lighter-side by sharing brand-appropriate content (Leibler & Chaney, 2014). To effectively leverage this vertical, content must amuse while being appropriate to ensure providers support their customers’ interests and simultaneously relating to a value proposition. Using humour to demonstrate personality humanizes a brand, creates opportunities to develop memorable relationships and provide shareworthy content to be shared with a users’ social community, and, if lucky, create viral content. Customers gain value through the intrinsic value behind the mental exercise that is humour, such as relieving daily stress, and helps create a positive mental association with the brand. Given that humour is a universally engaging emotion, a provider can show a lighter and amusing side if, for instance, a professional sports team commences in friendly banter with their opponents using Twitter to bring the competitive spirit outside of the actual game or match. These activities demonstrate a willingness to engage with competitors to entertain stakeholders outside of traditional sport norms while allowing for fans (and competitors alike) to engage with the brand and further bring sport to life.

Framework Application

Given that social media is more about relationships than transactions, this study provides insights into how marketers can avoid monopolizing a communication channel and providing one-way, directional messages that can devolve into another form of marketing spam. While organizations can stimulate discussion about their offerings by posting to social media platforms, co-created value often exists between customers outside the influence of the organization. It is important that organizations focus on content that initiates this discussion, in addition to interactions with themselves, or risk being seen as posting irrelevant content and losing effectiveness. For instance, if a family-owned restaurant posted advertising-centric messaging about a partner organization to their social media channels as part of a larger marketing agreement. This type of partner marketing, which restaurants often do via selling advertising space within the physical restaurant, can support the organization’s bottom line but limits overall effectiveness of driving interactions as users perceive this negatively.

When examining the potential co-created value that social networks provide, and avoid erroneous pitfalls of treating SMM as another advertising channel, there are three important considerations to consider. The first is that while these verticals can be considered distinctive, they are not mutually exclusive when singular posts are used to accomplish multiple goals. For instance, a university can post pictures of current students engaging in on-campus activities, such as attending unique guest speakers that are only available to enrolled students. This content could be considered both educating and stimulating at the same time, based upon the stakeholders that interact with the content. The university would benefit two-fold as current students are educated about the availability of unique learning opportunities. Alumni could have an emotional response to their memories of university life and share their unique experiences.

The second key consideration is the underlying role that listening, or monitoring, social conversations has—not just within the provider-centred channels but also the interactions between customers. Monitoring, which allows providers to understand the sentiment expressed by customers (Schweidel & Moe, 2014), is a core consideration on the effective application of this framework to ensure co-created value. Regardless of the vertical, listening to SMM conversations concerning the provider, their current or potential customers, and social objects of interest will ensure content is relatable to customer’s wants and desires. Tactically, without effective listening tactics, organizations would be unable to implement respond content as they have only partial information or only address concerns that are directly sent to their social media or other owned communication channels. In addition, providers would encounter extraordinary challenges in providing awareness content. Without understanding topics of importance, providers would not have the depth of knowledge about topics that customers deem important and their content would be unable to engage in topics greater than the brand themselves.

The third key is the utilitarian value of these verticals into other established models. The social media honeycomb model where Kietzman et al. (2011) present their foundational building blocks for success is one such application. In this model, they share the seven building blocks of social media, relating to both the functionality and proposed implications. All honeycomb features could benefit from this framework but the conversations block, which talks about how content is shared and the overall management of that process, represents a pertinent application. This structure can assist in articulating specific types of content that a provider leverages to drive conversations and co-create value. For instance, if a provider were to focus on the groups building block, the framework provides structure to create awareness content to drive interest for customers more interested in community-focused social relationships. While this is only one example, it can be applied to diverse topics ranging from the type of interactions that customers have with social technology to the role that content serves in relating peer user commentary (Tang & Liu, 2011; Zubiaga et al., 2018).

Implications and Opportunities

In developing an effective model, the core concepts, potential applications, relationships to previous theory, and a logical explanation along with applications have been outlined (Wacker, 2008). However, it is important to identify potential weaknesses to inform our opportunities for greater insights moving forward. One area of interest would be the impact of advertisements or paid features of social media. This article has focussed on organically developed content instead of paid distribution. While paid media can create value via a stronger sales proposition, it is significantly different and needs to be separately investigated if the presence of these advertisements impacts or can actually deconstruct value.

While involving customers to co-create value is an important strategy, there are two essential concepts to value: value to the organization and value of the customer (Repoviene, 2017). While social media has been identified as one of the core ways in which a provider can successfully engage in value co-creation, the more active engagement providers have with customers the greater opportunities there are for negative impacts. Value can be deconstructed when interactions occur that generate value imbalances between actors, where either the customer or provider sees a discrepancy between their expectations and actual value (Zhang, Lu, Torres, & Chen, 2018). Given our knowledge in this area is lacking and the variety of factors increase analysis complexity, an understanding behind the range of value deconstruction activities that exists in procedures, tasks mechanisms, activities, and interactions needs to be assessed (Ple, 2017).

Ultimately, this study builds on previous research to develop a classification framework that can be applied horizontally across disciplines, communication channels, and various other applications. To move our conceptual understanding forward, future research should test framework efficacy and how each of these variables contribute to co-created value, assess the influence that delivery methods or social media channels have on verticals, and look at the interaction of social media as it relates to the physical co-creation of experiences. From an applied perspective, future research should assess the successful use and application of these types of posts, incorporate readily available social media data to measure contributions, and establish benchmarks or best practices related to the use of SMM content.

Footnotes

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

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