Unveiling the role of social networking sites for project customer engagement

Stakeholder engagement has substantial value for project success. Specifically, close relationships with customers encourage long-term loyalty and favor the collection of valuable information for the project development. Despite social media may play a prominent role for strategically communicate and opportunistically interact in real time or asynchronously with project customer, whether and how Social Networking Sites are leveraged for communicating with, involving, and developing relationships with customers has not been adequately explored in the project organizing literature. To fill this gap and, therefore, understand the process of customer engagement through Social Networking Sites, we conduct a longitudinal study on a specific type of project -i.e., sports event- in which these Internet-based platforms represent a tool increasingly used for engaging spectators, including those physically or virtually attending the event. In line with the process theorizing, we focus on the communication process to understand the pattern of activities and choices through which a Social Media team has been narrating over time this international project through Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. Our empirical investigation revealed that the digital communication process accomplished as an “ongoing pragmatic compromise”, where SM teams must be open to users and, at the same time, careful to interpret whether and how the interaction with the environment affects the narrative. Some cognitive and behavioural capacities of the SM team were thus essential to manage effectively and timely the communication patterns between SM team and SNs’ users, considering the contextual situations. The theoretical contribution of this study is twofold. Firstly, it contributes to the PM literature by enriching the knowledge on project customer engagement leveraging new technologies expected to play an increasingly important role in communicating the projects and mobilizing multiple actors towards a supportive project narrative. Further, we contributed to literature dealing with using SNs’ use in sports events. Unlike existing studies, we have adopted the under-explored perspective of event organizers and included in the analysis different SNs to figure out how different platforms dialogued with each other and contributed to the overall event narrative.