بازتاب در “رسانه های اجتماعی: تاثیر بر رضایت مشتری در فروش B2B” و یک برنامه تحقیقاتی Reflections on “social media: Influencing customer satisfaction in B2B sales” and a research agenda

1. Introduction Social media is the communication phenomenon of our time (boyd, 2015), with a growing body of research attempting to better understand the shift in power from firms to consumers brought about by the use of social media (Berthon, Pitt, Plangger, & Shapiro, 2012). As the scope and volume of communication through social media have increased, the last few years have witnessed growing interest in better understanding the benefits and uses of social media in business-to-business (B2B) contexts (Agnihotri, Dingus, Hu, and Krush (2016)). This includes research on the role of advertising and content marketing (Holliman & Rowley, 2014; Michaelidou, Siamagka, & Christodoulides, 2011), relationships and interactions between consumers and salespeople (Sood & Pattinson, 2012; Wang, Pauleen, & Zhang, 2016), the creation of networks (Singaraju, Nguyen, Niininen, & Sullivan-Mort, 2016), social media usage and acceptance (Keinänen & Kuivalainen, 2015; Lacka & Chong, 2016), implementation of online communities (Valos, Turner, Scheepers, & Stockdale, 2015), strategies for brand innovation and popularity (Nguyen, Yu, Melewar, & Chen, 2015; Swani, Milne, & Brown, 2013), and selling processes (Agnihotri et al., 2016; Agnihotri, Kothandaraman, Kashyap, & Singh, 2012; Guesalaga, 2016). Yet, despite soaring social media adoption and the scope of potential benefits of social media for improving communication between salespeople and customers (Agnihotri et al., 2012), research remains limited compared with that in a consumer context (Salo, 2017; Siamagka, Christodoulides, Michaelidou, & Valvi, 2015). Agnihotri et al. (2016) take a perspective that is at the core of B2B marketing—namely, understanding the influence of social media within the sales process. As such, their theoretical contribution rests on integrating two key aspects of value generation in B2B into a single framework. The first aspect is the link between social media and company performance (i.e., sales); the second involves the way social media use influences consumers and their relationship with the firm throughout the sales process. With this in mind, the purpose of the current article is threefold. First, we provide a critical commentary on Agnihotri et al. (2016). Second, we position their article within the broader body of research, with the aim to refine current understanding of the relationship between social media and sales. Third, we present a research agenda based on five emergent themes to identify future research directions around the use of social media in sales contexts.