The 9th International Conference on Electronic Business, Macau, November 30 - December 4, 2009 THE USE OF SOCIAL MEDIA IN GATHERING AND SHARING COMPETITIVE INTELLIGENCE Vilma Vuori 1 and Jaani Väisänen 2 Department of Business Information Management and Logistics Tampere University of Technology, Finland 1 vilma.vuori@tut.fi ; 2 jaani.vaisanen@tut.fi Abstract Utilizing social media in the business context is an issue of growing interest. This article discusses how social media can contribute to information gathering and to information and knowledge sharing within a company in the context of competitive intelligence. The research is conducted as a systematic literature review. The results show that so far only a few journal articles have been published discussing these issues. They propose that social media applications can contribute to competitive intelligence activities more in sharing than gathering information and knowledge. The common benefit received from using different social media applications seems to be the added value compared to using more traditional knowledge sharing tools. Keywords: Social Media, Competitive Intelligence, Identifying Information Sources, Information Gathering, Information Sharing, Knowledge Sharing Introduction Social media (sometimes referred to as web 2.0) is a hot topic in competitive intelligence. Competitive intelligence professionals are keen to find out ways to use Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, blogs and other social media applications to competitive intelligence purposes. [1] [2] There seems to be two approaches to social media in the competitive intelligence context. First one is the information gathering approach. It considers how social media applications can advance information source identification and information gathering from the company’s external business environment. This is based on the basic default of having a competitive intelligence unit or suchlike centralized personnel responsible for the company’s competitive intelligence process. The focus is on how their work can be made more efficient with the use of social media. The other perspective is the information sharing approach. It looks at social media as a means to share information and knowledge and enabler of collaborative competitive intelligence throughout the company. This approach sees competitive intelligence as a united effort of the whole organization: social media is considered as a way to empower employees and getting them to participate in the competitive intelligence process as information sources, refiners and users. While companies can utilize social media according to either of the approaches described above, it is the authors’ understanding that the former way is more common. This is possibly due to the fact that the continuously increasing amount of available information creates additional pressures for companies to gather as much of this information as they possibly can in order to gain competitive edge over their competitors. While many social media applications, such as automated RSS feeds actually save time and effort when monitoring the competitive environment, the authors hypothesize that without an effective way to process or disseminate that knowledge to the workforce, the end result will be information overflow, or at least information that is not used to its full potential. Therefore, harnessing the social media applications to share the captured information and knowledge throughout the company to the correct personnel is as imperative as capturing the information in the first place. Since social media as a phenomenon is rather new [3], the academic literature on the subject is still relatively scarce. The authors conducted a systematic literature review on how both these approaches to social media have been utilized in the competitive intelligence context. Based on the reviewed literature, a set of potential benefits for utilizing social media as enhancer of information gathering and an enabler for internal information and knowledge sharing are derived. Social media makes its way from leisure to business Web 2.0 is a buzzword that has been increasingly hyped since its introduction in 2004 [3]. Although web 2.0 is often used as an adjacent term with social media, they are not synonyms. Web 2.0 refers to the technological features of the new generation of Internet, whereas social media is used to describe the actions enabled by web 2.0 applications. Social media is closely related to human interaction, social networking and publishing information. The term web 2.0 itself does not necessarily include the media aspect or any social activity [4]. Web 2.0 uses several technologies that enable