THE ROLE OF ENTREPRENEURIAL MARKETING IN SOCIAL MEDIA Michael Valos: Deakin University, Melbourne, Australia Alex Maritz: Agse, Melbourne, Australia Howard Frederick: Deakin University, Melbourne, Australia ∼ Contact: Alex Maritz, AGSE, PO Box 218, Hawthorn, 3122 Melbourne, Australia, Email: amaritz@swin.edu.au ABSTRACT Social media are increasingly emerging as a source of competitive advantage, as a means of reaching and engaging consumers, and as a source of consumer insight. This paper identifies challenges associated with the implementation of social media as perceived by senior marketers. Using a qualitative thematic analysis methodology, we identify differences between entrepreneurial and non- entrepreneurial organisations in social media implementation. It is proposed that entrepreneurial marketing may provide theoretical guidelines for implementation of social media. The paper concludes with research propositions that will test the effectiveness of entrepreneurial marketing in overcoming the implementation challenges of social media. INTRODUCTION Social media (known colloquially as Web 2.0) are having a pervasive effect on the marketing strategy of organisations (Barnes and Mattson 2008; Smith 2008; Mangold and Faulds 2009; Barnes 2010) and marketing communications budgets (Moorman 2010). Social media refer to such technology and communities as Facebook, Twitter, blogs, Wikipedia, YouTube, Flickr and so forth and are rapidly taking over many of the traditional marketing communications and traditional market research roles (Barnes 2010). Why are businesses adopting social media? The reasons are broad and diverse and include enhanced competitive advantage, better engagement with consumers, collaboration with stakeholders, co-production with consumers. Previous research into digital media, of which social media are a subset, has highlighted implementation challenges faced by organisations (Bushley 2010). These include: the risk of losing control of marketing (Pauker Kreitzberg 2009); integrating digital media to create value (Manyika, Roberts et al. 2008; Nath, Singh et al. 2010); measuring return on investment (ROI) (Fisher 2009); internal structure and culture (Chui, Miller et al. 2009); managing risk (Chui, Miller et al. 2009); understanding the role of social media (Saperstein and Hastings 2010); and winning stakeholder support (Chakravorti 2010). The challenges that marketers face include: complexity of managing a greater number of media channels (Wilson and Daniel 2007); and misunderstanding the roles that social and digital media can play vis--vis traditional marketing media tools (van Dijk, Minocha et al. 2007). In this study, we examine how the theory of entrepreneurial marketing (EM) may provide guidelines in social media use in businesses and organisations. We start with the definition that entrepreneurial marketing is the pro-active identification and exploitation of opportunities for acquiring and retaining appropriate stakeholders through innovative approaches to risk management, resource leveraging and value creation (Maritz 2008). In other words, just like all entrepreneurial organisations, entrepreneurial marketing organisations are those demonstrate pro-active opportunity evaluation (Shane and Venkataraman 2000), risk management and taking, resource leveraging, and value creation (Maritz and Nieman 2008). This study uses qualitative insights drawn from a thematic analysis (Aronson 1994) of senior marketing executives and from the theory of entrepreneurial marketing in order to identify testable research propositions. Drawing upon Eisenhardt and Graebner (2007), we seek to extract factors and xxx 683