The Costumer Knowledge Management on Social Media: Case of Starbucks

The most important thing to compete at today's business is to satisfy needs and expectations of the customer. To do this, customers must be followed on a regular basis to learn what they want. Organizations have long recognized knowledge management as an important business strategy. In order to manage customers increasing sophistication and changing preferences, the static knowledgewarehouse based approach of knowledge management is undergoing a paradigm shift towards a dynamic customer-centric approach. Social media refers to a collection of online services that supports social interactions among users and allows them to co-create, find, share and evaluate the online information repository. Social media services have distinct technical features that unleash passion among users to engage in knowledge sharing. The openness and participation properties of social media entwine users and content, rendering it suitable for the dynamic, customer-centric customer knowledge management strategies. The purpose of this paper is to analyze the extent to which the use of social media can support customer knowledge management in organizations relying on a traditional physical / retail business model. The paper uses a combination of qualitative case study and netnography on Starbucks, an international coffee house chain.