Managing Customer Information and Knowledge with Social Media in Business-to-Business Companies

The recent innovation literature has increasingly emphasized the efficient use of knowledge and information not only inside the company borders, but particularly the knowledge locating outside the company borders, such as the knowledge of customers and users. In addition, the co-creation of new knowledge has gained fast in importance. Various types of collaborative web tools and approaches, such as social media, can enable and significantly increase the collaboration, the collaborative knowledge creation and the use of the distributed knowledge both within and outside the company borders. In this paper, we have studied the role and possibilities of social media in the sharing and creation of customer information and knowledge especially from the perspective of business-to-business companies' innovation with an extensive literature review. Business-to-business context was chosen because it is in many ways a very different environment for social media than business-to-consumer context, and is currently very little academically studied.