Toward a Social Media Usage Policy

Social media has become the archetype of technology underpinning communication and collaboration across all lifestyles, from the personal to the public. Despite its increasing deployment into corporate technology infrastructures, the encroachment of social media poses several doubts, including its business value, need for a social media strategy and its appropriate management. Although given a pressing need, there is a lack of clear guidance from IS literature around how to study these challenges, and ultimately to answer the question— is the use of social media a distraction at the work place? This research-in-progress paper lays the foundation to answer this specific question. Our work positions social media as a platform that can enable business and service value co-creation. We propose the Social Media -Beliefs, Action and Outcomes (SM-BAO) model, to help develop a framework that can inform social media use policy in the workplace