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Social media has recently received increased attention from practitioners and academics. Although social media helps build relationships, no academic study to date has investigated the use of social media by key account managers, although building and developing relationships with key customers are at the core of these managers' expertise. This research contributes to building the first level of understanding of howkey account managers use social media and the major issues. To address this topic, we perform a qualitative research study using the grounded theory methodology. We present a model of key account managers' use of social media derived from our empirical data and relate it to a key customer engagement model.
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Industrial Marketing Management 54 (2016) 33–43 Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Industrial Marketing Management Perspectives on social media ant its use by key account managers Sylvie Lacoste Leonard de Vinci, Pôle Universitaire, Business Lab, 12 av. Leonard de Vinci, 92916 Paris La Defense Cedex, France a r t i c l e i n f o Article history: Received 28 February 2015 Received in revised form 17 December 2015 Accepted 18 December 2015 Available online 31 December 2015 Keywords: Social media Key account managers LinkedIn Viadeo a b s t r a c t Social media has recently received increased attention from practitioners and academics. Although social media helps build relationships, no academic study to date has investigated the use of social media by key account managers, although building and developing relationships with key customers are at the core of these managers' expertise. This research contributes to building the first level of understanding of how key account managers use social media and the major issues. To address this topic, we perform a qualitative research study using the grounded theory methodology. We present a model of key account managers' use of social media derived from our empirical data and relate it to a key customer engagement model. © 2015 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. 1. Introduction A 2015 Deloitte report on Facebook's global economic impact (Deloitte, 2015) shows that Facebook has 1.35 billion connected people, has an economic impact totaling US$227 billion and enabled 4.5 million jobs. The report stresses that businesses increasingly use Facebook's marketing tools (pages and targeted advertising) to grow. The number of active social users increased by 12% between 2014 and 2015; today, 56% of the North American population and 44% of the Western European population have an active social account (“We Are Social,” 2015). Although Facebook ranks number one in social media, it is followed by mixed personal and professional use of Google+ and Twitter and by professional use of LinkedIn.1 Disentangling figures that address personal and professional data is occasionally difficult, but today's ever-increasing number of active social accounts is an indicator that firms and individuals seek professional benefits from social media. There are numerous definitions of social media, ranging from the seminal article by Kaplan and Haenlein (2010), who consider social media involves Internet-based applications that create and exchange user-generated content, to the simpler definition of “any tool or service that uses the Internet to facilitate conversations” (Safko, 2011). However, researchers (Agnihotri, Kothandaraman, Kashyap, & Singh, 2012) posit that individuals use social media “to participate in social networks, which enable[d] them to create and share content, communicate with one another, and build relationships” (Hennig-Thurau et al., 2010, p. 312). Defining social media as a tool that helps build relationships is particularly relevant in key account management (KAM). KAM is defined as