SMEs are beginning to capitalize on social media tools in a variety of ways. Users contribute to the development of content through writing comments and recommendations on Google, Yahoo, and Facebook, submitting videos on YouTube, co-designing games like The Sims, creating avatars in virtual environments like Second Life, or developing open source codes for Linux (Lee, 2011). Most of the SMEs adopted social media to some degree. A survey of decision-makers in German SMEs indicates that SMEs started to use internal social media (e.g., wikis, blogs) in order to support collaboration among employees and to improve knowledge management (Meske & Stieglitz, 2013). However, SMEs still face problems in identifying relevant business values. This section introduces five types of social media tools for SMEs.
Media Sharing: A social media application that enables users to create, store, and share their multimedia files (photos, videos, sounds) with others.
Business model: A decision-making framework for developing logically coherent activities to support value creation and formulating strategies to sustain competitive advantages.
Governance: Systems and processes that ensure the overall direction, effectiveness, supervision and accountability of an organization.
Social Bookmarking: The process of adding, annotating, editing, and sharing bookmarks with others.
Sustainability: The development of the ways a company can gain a sustainable competitive advantage in the market.